A Russian Journal

by John Steinbeck

  There was one rather terrifying exception. Directly behind the hotel, and in a place overlooked by our windows, there was a little garbage pile, where melon rinds, bones, potato peels, and such things were thrown out. And a few yards farther on, there was a little hummock, like the entrance to a gopher hole. And every morning, early, out of this hole a young girl crawled. She had long legs and bare feet, and her arms were thin and stringy, and her hair was matted and filthy. She was covered with years of dirt, so that she looked very brown. And when she raised her face, it was one of the most beautiful faces we have ever seen. Her eyes were crafty, like the eyes of a fox, but they were not human. The face was well developed and not moronic. Somewhere in the terror of the fighting in the city, something had snapped, and she had retired to some comfort of forgetfulness. She squatted on her hams and ate watermelon rinds and sucked the bones of other people’s soup. She usually stayed there for about two hours before she got her stomach full. And then she went out in the weeds, and lay down, and went to sleep in the sun. Her face was of a chiseled loveliness, and on her long legs she moved with the grace of a wild animal. The other people who lived in the cellars of the lot rarely spoke to her. But one morning I saw a woman come out of another hole and give her half a loaf of bread. And the girl clutched at it almost snarlingly and held it against her chest. She looked like a half-wild dog at the woman who had given her the bread, and watched her suspiciously until she had gone back into her own cellar, and then she turned and buried her face in the slab of black bread, and like an animal she looked over the bread, her eyes twitching back and forth. And as she gnawed at the bread, one side of her ragged filthy shawl slipped away from her dirty young breast, and her hand automatically brought the shawl back and covered her breast, and patted it in place with a heart-breaking feminine gesture.

  We wondered how many there might be like this, minds that could not tolerate living in the twentieth century any more, that had retired not to the hills, but into the ancient hills of the human past, into the old wilderness of pleasure, and pain, and self-preservation. It was a face to dream about for a long time.

  Late in the afternoon Colonel Denchenko called on us and asked if we would like to see the area of the fighting for Stalingrad. He was a fine-looking man, with a shaved head, a man of about fifty. He wore a white tunic and belt, and his breast was well decorated. He took us around the city and showed us where the Twenty-First Army had held, and where the Sixty-Second Army had supported it. He had brought the battle maps. He took us to the exact place where the Germans were stopped, and beyond which they had been unable to move. And on the edge of this line is Pavlov’s house, which is a national shrine and will probably continue to be one.

  Pavlov’s house was an apartment building, and Pavlov was a sergeant. Pavlov with nine men held the apartment house for fifty-two days against everything the Germans could bring against it. And the Germans never took Pavlov’s house, and they never took Pavlov. And this was the farthest point of their conquest.

  Colonel Denchenko took us to the edge of the river and showed us where the Russians had stood and could not be dislodged under the steep banks. And all about were the rusting ruins of the weapons the Germans had brought to bear. The colonel was a Kiev man, and he had the light blue eyes of the Ukrainians. He was fifty, and his son had been killed at Leningrad.

  He showed us the hill from which the greatest German drive had come, and there was activity on the hill, and tanks were deployed on the side hill. At the bottom were several rows of artillery. A documentary film company from Moscow was making a history of the siege of Stalingrad before the city is rebuilt. And in the river a barge was anchored. The picture company had come down from Moscow on the river, and they lived on the barge.

  And now Chmarsky’s gremlin got to work again. We said we would like to take photographs of this motion picture while they were making it.

  And Chmarsky said, “Very well, tonight I will call them and find out if we can get permission.”

  So we went back to our hotel, and as soon as we got there we heard the artillery firing. In the morning when he telephoned that phase of the shooting was all over and we had missed it. Day after day we tried to take pictures of this refilming of the siege of Stalingrad, and every day we missed it through one accident or another. Chmarsky’s gremlin was working all the time.

  In the afternoon we walked across the square to a little park near the river, and there under a large obelisk of stone, was a garden of red flowers, and under the flowers were buried a great number of the defenders of Stalingrad. Few people were in the park, but one woman sat on a bench, and a little boy about five or six stood against the fence, looking in at the flowers. He stood so long that we asked Chmarsky to speak to him.

  Chmarsky asked him in Russian, “What are you doing here?”

  And the little boy, without sentimentality, in a matter-of-fact voice said, “I am visiting my father. I come to see him every night.”

  It was not pathos, it was not sentimentality. It was simply a statement of fact, and the woman on the bench looked up, and nodded to us, and smiled. And after a while she and the little boy walked away through the park, back to the ruined city.

  In the morning, when breakfast came to our room, we thought some major insanity had taken place. Breakfast consisted of tomato salad, pickles, watermelon, and cream soda. But it was not an insanity, it was just a normal Stalingrad breakfast. We did manage to get the cream soda changed to tea. And after a while we even grew to like tomato salad for breakfast. After all, what is it but solid tomato juice? But we never quite got used to the cream soda.

  The square in front of our hotel was very broad, and it was surrounded with wrecked buildings. On one standing wall there was a loud-speaker which played from early in the morning until late at night. It broadcast speeches, and news reports, and there was a great deal of singing. And it played so loudly that we could hear it with the covers over our heads. It played so loudly that it nearly burst its own diaphragm, and often we wished it would.

  We wanted to see and photograph the famous Stalingrad tractor factory. For it was in this factory that the men had continued to build tanks when the Germans were firing on them. And when the Germans got too close, they put down their tools, and went out and defended the factory, and then went back and continued working. Mr. Chmarsky, wrestling manfully with his gremlins, said he would try to arrange it for us. And in the morning, sure enough, we were told that we could go to see it.

  The factory is on the edge of the town, and we could see its tall smokestacks as we drove out toward it. And the ground around it was torn and shot to pieces, and the tractor factory buildings were half in ruin. We arrived at the gate, and two guards came out, looked at the camera equipment Capa had in our bus, went back, telephoned, and immediately a number of other guards came out. They looked at the cameras and did more telephoning. The ruling was inflexible. We were not even allowed to take the cameras out of the bus. The factory manager was with us now, and the chief engineer, and half a dozen other officials. And once the ruling was accepted by us they were extremely friendly. We could see everything, but we could not photograph anything. We were very sad about this, because in its way this tractor factory was as positive a thing as the little farms in the Ukraine. Here in the factory, which had been defended by its own workers, and where those same workers were still building tractors, could be found the spirit of the Russian defense. And here, in its highest and most overwhelming aspect, we found the terror of the camera.

  Inside the big gates the factory was a remarkable place, for while one group worked on the assembly line, the forges, the stamping machines, another crew was rebuilding the ruins. All buildings had been hit, most of them deroofed, and some of them completely destroyed. And the restoration went on while the tractors came off the line. We saw the furnaces where the metal is poured, and big pieces of German tanks and guns being thrown in for scrap. And we saw the metal come out through the rollers. We saw the molding
, and the stamping, and the finishing, and the grinding of parts. And at the end of the line the new tractors, painted and polished, rolled out and stood in a parking lot waiting for the trains to take them out to the fields. And among the half-ruined buildings, the builders, the workers with metal and brick and glass, rebuilt the factory. There had been no time to wait until the factory was ready before starting production again.

  We do not understand why we were not permitted to photograph this factory, because as we walked through we found that practically all the machinery was made in America, and we were told that the assembly line and the assembly method had been laid out by American engineers and technicians. And it is reasonable to believe that these technicians knew what they were doing and would remember, so that if there were any malice in America toward this plant in the way of bombing, the information must be available. And yet to photograph the plant was taboo. Actually we did not want photographs of the plant. What we wanted were photographs of the men and the women at work. Much of the work in the Stalingrad tractor factory is done by women. But there was no hole in the taboo. We could not take a picture. The fear of the camera is deep and blind.

  Also we could not find out the number of units per day that were turned out, for this would be contrary to the new law, which makes the divulgence of industrial information treason equal to the telling of military information. However, we could find out percentages. We were told that the factory was only two per cent below pre-war production, and if we had wanted to, I suppose, we could have found out what pre-war production was, and thus estimated the number of tractors that were coming off the line. The finished machines are standard, and only one type is made. They are heavy-duty machines, not very large, but capable of doing any ordinary farm work. They are not stream-lined or prettified, and there are no extras. We were told that they are very good tractors, but they are not made for looks, for there is no competition. One manufacturer does not compete with another by the use of eye-pleasing forms. And it was in this place that the workers built tanks while the shells tore through the buildings and destroyed the factory bit by bit. There was a kind of terrible allegory in this factory, for here, side by side, were the results of the two great human potentials: production and destruction.

  When Capa cannot take pictures he mourns, and here very particularly he mourned, because everywhere his eyes saw contrasts, and angles, and pictures that had meaning beyond their meaning. He said bitterly, “Here, with two pictures, I could have shown more than many thousands of words could say.”

  Capa was bitter and sad until luncheon, and then felt better. And he felt still better in the afternoon when we took a little riverboat and went for an excursion on the Volga. It is a lovely, wide, placid river at this time of year, and in this place, and it is the road for much of the transportation of the area. Little tugs, barges loaded with grain and ore, lumber and oil, ferries and excursion boats, cruised about. From the river one could see as a whole the destruction of the city.

  On the river there were huge rafts with little towns built on them, sometimes five or six houses, and little corrals with cows, and goats, and chickens. These rafts had come from the far northern tributaries of the Volga, where the logs had been cut, and they moved slowly down the river, stopping at cities and towns that have been destroyed. The local authorities requisition the logs that are needed. In every place where they stopped, the requisitioned logs were cut loose and floated ashore, so that as the rafts moved down the river, they diminished gradually in size. But the process takes so long that the crews who live on the rafts have set up tiny townships on their rafts.

  The life on the river was very rich, and it reminded us of Mark Twain’s account of the Mississippi of his day. Little side-wheelers rushed up and down the river, and a few heavy, clumsy boats even moved under sail.

  We went close to one of the big log rafts, and we saw one woman milking a cow in a little corral, and another hanging out washed clothes behind her house, while the men were cutting loose the logs which would be floated ashore to help in the rebuilding of Stalingrad.

  Mr. Chmarsky’s gremlin really worked overtime in Stalingrad. First it had been the motion-picture company, and then the factory, and even with the little boat excursion his gremlin was busy. We had wanted a small light boat, in which we could move rapidly up and down, and what we got instead was a large cruiser-like boat of the Russian Navy. And we had it all to ourselves, except for its crew. We had wanted a boat with shallow draught, so that we could move close to the shore, and instead we had a boat which had to stand offshore, because it drew too much water. We had to maneuver among small canoe-like boats, in which whole families brought their produce to the markets of Stalingrad, their tomatoes and their piles of melons, their cucumbers and their inevitable cabbages.

  In one market at Stalingrad there was a photographer with an old bellows camera. He was taking a picture of a stern young army recruit, who sat stiffly on a box. The photographer looked around and saw Capa photographing him and the soldier. He gave Capa a fine professional smile and waved his hat. The young soldier did not move. He gazed fixedly ahead.

  We were taken to the office of the architect who was directing the plans for the new city of Stalingrad. The suggestion had been put forward that the city be moved up or down the river, and no attempt be made to rebuild it, because the removal of the debris would be so much work. It would have been cheaper and easier to start fresh. Two arguments had been advanced against this: first, that much of the sewage system and the underground electrical system was probably still intact; and second, there was the dogged determination that the city of Stalingrad should, for sentimental reasons, be restored exactly where it had been. And this was probably the most important reason. The extra work of clearing the debris could not stand up against this feeling.

  There were about five architectural plans for restoring the city, and no plaster model had been made yet because none of the plans had been approved. They had two things in common: one was that the whole center of Stalingrad was to be made into public buildings, as grandiose as those projected at Kiev—gigantic monuments and huge marble embankments with steps which would go down to the Volga, parks and colonnades, pyramids and obelisks, and gigantic statues of Stalin and Lenin. These were painted, and in projection, and in blueprints. And it reminded us again that in two things the Americans and Russians are very much alike. Both peoples love machinery, and both peoples love huge structures. Probably the two things that the Russians admire most in America are the Ford plant and the Empire State Building.

  While a little army of architects works on the great plans for rebuilding Stalingrad, it also works on little things, on schools and the restoration of villages, and on the design of tiny houses. For the city is being rebuilt on its edges, and thousands of small houses are going up, and many apartment houses are being built on the outskirts of the city. But the center is being left for the time when the plans for the public city can materialize.

  We spoke to the chief architect about the people we had seen living underground, and living in bits of ruins, and we asked why they were not on the edge of the city, building houses for themselves.

  He smiled very understandingly and he said, “Well, you see these people are in the cellars of the buildings they once lived in, and there are two reasons why they do not want to move, and why they insist that they will not move. One is because they like it there, because they have always lived there, and people hate to move from the things they are used to, even when they are destroyed. And the second reason has to do with transportation. We have not enough busses, we have no streetcars, and if they move they will have to walk a great distance to get to work and to get back, and it seems just too much trouble.”

  And we asked, “But what are you going to do with them?”

  He said, “When we have houses for them to move into, we will have to move them. We hope by that time to have the busses, the streetcars, and the methods to get them to and from their work wit
hout a great deal of effort.”

  While we were in the architect’s office an official came in and asked whether we would like to see the gifts to the city of Stalingrad from the people of the rest of the world. And we, although we were museum-happy, thought we had to see them. We went back to our hotel to rest a little, and we had no sooner got there when there was a knock on the door. We opened it, and a line of men came in carrying boxes, and cases, and portfolios, and they laid them down. These were the gifts to the people of Stalingrad. There was a red velvet shield, covered with a lace of gold filigree from the King of Ethiopia. There was a parchment scroll of high-blown words from the United States government, signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. There was a metal plaque from Charles de Gaulle, and the sword of Stalingrad, sent by the English King to the city of Stalingrad. There was a tablecloth with the embroidered names of fifteen hundred women in a small British town. The men brought the things to our room because there is no museum yet in Stalingrad. We had to look at the giant portfolios, wherein were written in the windiest of language greetings to the citizens of Stalingrad from governments, and prime ministers, and presidents.