A Russian Journal

by John Steinbeck

  Our train came down to the shore of the Black Sea and paralleled it. The whole of this coast is one gigantic summer resort. Every little distance is a great sanatorium or a hotel, and the beaches even in the morning are thronged with bathers, for this is the rest place and this is the vacation place of nearly all of the Soviet Union.

  Now our train seemed to stop every few feet. And at every stop groups of people got off, groups who were assigned to one rest house or another. This is the vacation that nearly all Russian workers look forward to. It is the reward for long hard work, and it is the recuperation place for the wounded and the sick. Seeing this country, with its calm sea and its warm air, we realized why people all over Russia said to us again and again, “Just wait until you see Georgia!”

  Batum is a very pleasant little tropical city, a city of beaches and hotels, and an important shipping point on the Black Sea. It is a city of parks and tree-shaded streets, and the breeze from the sea keeps it from being too hot.

  The Intourist Hotel here was the finest and most luxurious in the Soviet Union. The rooms were pleasant and newly decorated, and each one had a balcony with chairs. The full-length windows made it possible to open whole rooms to the outside. After the night in an old museum-piece of a coach, we looked longingly at the beds, but they were not for us. We barely got away with a bath. Our time was running short, and we had to see a great deal in a very short time.

  In the afternoon we visited several of the rest houses. They are large palaces set in magnificent gardens, and nearly all of them look out to the sea. It would be dangerous to be experts in these things. Nearly everyone who has ever traveled in Russia has become an expert, and nearly every expert cancels out every other expert. We must be very careful in what we say about these rest houses. We must repeat only what we were told in the ones we saw, and even then we’ll bet we get an argument from somebody.

  The first one we visited looked like a very luxurious hotel. It was at the head of a long set of steps that led up from the beach, and it was surrounded by great trees, and in front of it was an enormous porch overlooking the water. This one was owned by a Moscow branch of the electricians’ union, and the people who stayed in it were electricians. We asked how they got to come, and we were told that in every factory, in every workshop, there is a committee which includes not only representatives of the factory workers, but a company doctor. A number of factors are taken into consideration by the committee which designates the people who are to come on vacation. There is length of service, there is physical condition, there is quality of tiredness, and there is reward for service beyond that which is required. And if a worker has been sick and needs a long rest, the medical section of his factory committee designates him for a trip to a rest house.

  One part of this rest house was set aside for single men, another for single women, and a third part for whole families, who had apartments for their vacations. There was a restaurant where everyone ate, and there were game rooms, and reading-rooms, and music rooms. In one game room people were playing chess and checkers; in another a fast ping-pong game was going on. The tennis courts were crowded with players and spectators, and the stairs were lined with people climbing up from the beach or going down to swim. The hotel had its own boats and fishing equipment. Many of the people simply sat in chairs and looked off toward the sea. There were recuperating illnesses here, and there were the results of industrial accidents, sent down to get well in the warm air of the Black Sea. The average vacation was twenty-eight days, but in cases of illness the stay might be protracted for as long as the factory committee wished.

  We were told that very many of the unions maintain rest houses on the sea for their members. This rest house could take about three hundred people at a time.

  We drove a few miles down the coast to a sanatorium, a place that again looked like a giant hotel. And this was a state sanatorium for tuberculars and people troubled with other pulmonary difficulties. It was part hospital and part rest house. It was a very pleasant sunny place. The bed-ridden patients had their beds pulled out on balconies overlooking the gardens and the sea, and the ambulatory cases wandered about, listening to music and playing the inevitable chess, which is a game second only to soccer in importance.

  The patients in this house were designated by the medical boards of their districts. This was a place of rest. When we came to it it seemed to be almost deserted, for all of the patients were in their beds. But while we were there a bell rang, and gradually they emerged to stroll about.

  We were told that there were many hundreds of such sanatoriums on the edges of the sea, and driving along the coast road we could see a great many of them among the trees on the hillside slopes.

  While we were driving, a heavy tropical rain began, and we went back to our hotel and finally got a couple of hours sleep. We were awakened by an unusual kind of music. There would be a passage of clarinet marmalade, played in unmistakable Benny Goodman style. Then the passage would stop, and a second clarinet would take up the same passage, but not in unmistakable Benny Goodman style. In a half doze it took us some time to realize what was happening in one of the rooms near us. Someone was listening to a passage of a Benny Goodman record, and then trying to imitate it, with only a modest amount of success. It went on and on, one passage repeated again and again and again. It is only when one sees the mess that is made of American swing music by most Europeans that one is able to realize how definite, how expert, and how unique American music is. Perhaps our musicians would have the same difficulty with the intricate rhythms and melodies of Georgian music. Certainly the Russians have plenty of trouble with ours, but they bring great enthusiasm to bear. We had not heard much American swing music in Tiflis, but in Batum there was a good deal. The hotels were filled with it, for many of the visitors had come down from Moscow where it is played more often.

  In the evening we were invited to a concert on the seashore by what was called the Tiflis jazz orchestra. In a little band shell beside the beach, the orchestra took its place, and it played its version of American jazz—“Shine,” and “China Boy,” and “In the Mood”—always “In the Mood.” When Capa and I came in to the concert, we were given huge bunches of flowers to hold, and we felt a little silly. Neither of us is quite the type to listen to a concert peering over the edge of fifteen pounds of gladioli. They were big bouquets, and there was nothing we could do with them. We couldn’t put them down, we had to peer through the spikes of flowers at the orchestra on the platform.

  We realized why they could not play American music well. Our swing music is invented and improvised. The musician puts himself and his imagination into his playing, whereas this Russian orchestra slavishly imitated records that it heard, and such records are not imitatable. If they wanted to play swing music, they should have taken perhaps the theme of “Dinah” and improvised on it, in which case they would have had music. It wouldn’t have been American swing music, but it might have been Georgian swing music.

  It was with relief that the orchestra turned to its own music and played the wild dances of the Georgian hills. And we were relieved too, because they were at home, and it was music. And after it was over, the leader and several of the players came back to the hotel with us to have dinner. The leader was a wiry, enthusiastic man, and with our Tinker to Evers to Chmarsky translation we tried to tell him about the background of American swing, how it had developed and what it was. He was fascinated with its theory, and he and his players would break into explosive explanations in Georgian. The idea that around a simple melody the musicians became creators of music, not to be written down, not to be preserved, but simply to be played, was new to him. And as he and his players listened, they grew more and more excited about the idea. We told them there was no reason why an American theme should be used. A Georgian theme with the same improvisation would be just as good, and probably an idea that they could better carry out. After a while they jumped up, and said good-by, and left us. And we imagine that somewhere in
the night, on the shore of the Black Sea, there was some wild experimenting with improvisation in the American manner.

  We never seemed to get enough sleep, but it was not entirely that which wearied us. We were on the go all the time, we were never able to settle back and think about things. Capa’s cameras had been snapping like firecrackers, and he was getting a lot of exposed film. Maybe it was something like this. We were seeing things all the time, we were having to see things all the time. For us, in a normal inefficient kind of an existence, we’d only see things a little part of the time, and the rest of the time we would just relax and not look at anything. But with our limited time on this trip, we had to see something every minute, and we were getting extremely tired. And there was one other thing too. We were living a life which for virtue has only been equaled once or twice in the history of the world. Part of this was intentional because we had too much to do, and part of it was because vice wasn’t very available. And we are fairly normal specimens. We love a well-turned ankle, or even a few inches above the ankle, clad, if possible, in a well-fitting nylon stocking. We are fond of all the tricks, and lies, and falsities that women use to fool and snare innocent and stupid men. We like these things very much—nice hair-dos, and perfume, and beautiful clothes, and nail polish, and lipstick, and eye-shadow, and false eyelashes. We had a definite hunger to be tricked and fooled. We like intricate French sauces, and vintage wines, and Perrier-Jouet champagne, approximately 1934. We like sweet-smelling bath soap, and soft white shirts. We like gypsy music played by a whole bloody battalion of violins. We like the crazy skirl of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet, and the hysterical laughter of Pee Wee Russell’s clarinet. And we were leading a life of limpid virtue. We were consciously circumspect. The most common attacks on foreigners in the Soviet press are on the basis of drunkenness and lechery. And while we are only reasonably alcoholic, and no more lecherous than most people, although this is a variable thing, we were determined to live the lives of saints. And this we succeeded in doing, not entirely to our satisfaction.

  There might have been one other thing that made us tired, and that was our conversation, which had been consistently kept on a high intellectual level. We do not mean to state categorically that Russians are stuffy, non-alcoholic, non-lecherous people. In their more private moments we don’t know if they are or not, but it is just possible that we were all showing off for each other a little bit, like housewives putting on a puff at a party. At any rate, at this time we were not only extremely tired, but we felt the squirm of decadence working under our skins.

  In the morning it was raining very hard, a warm soft rain. We turned over and went back to sleep. At about ten o’clock the sun broke through, and our committee came to take us to a state tea farm.

  We drove along the seashore, and then up through a cleft in the green mountains into a back valley, where the lines of dark green tea bushes stretched for miles, and here and there were groves of orange trees. It was a lovely piece of country, and it was the first state farm we had visited.

  Here again we cannot make generalities, we can only tell what we saw and what we were told. The state farm was run like an American corporation. It had its manager, and its board of directors, and its employees. The farm workers lived in apartment houses, new, and clean, and pleasant. Each family had its own apartment, and if the women worked in the fields, there were crèches for their children to stay in. And they had the same status as people who worked in factories.

  It was a very large farm, with its own schools and its own orchestras. The manager was a businesslike man, who might easily have been a manager of a branch factory of an American company. It was very different from the collective farms, for in the latter each farmer has a share in the profits of the collective. This was simply a factory for growing tea.

  The men worked with the conditioning of the land. Tea-picking was done mostly by the women, for their fingers were clever. The women moved across the field in long lines, and they sang and talked as they worked, and they were very pictorial. Capa took a great many pictures of them. And here, as everywhere, there were decorations for proficiency. There was one girl who had won a medal for her speed in picking tea, and her hands worked like lightning over the tea bushes, picking the fresh light green leaves and putting them in the basket she carried. The dark green of the tea bushes and the color of the women’s clothes made a very pretty scene on the hillside. At the bottom of the hill there was a truck to receive the fresh picked tea and take it to the processing plant.

  We followed the truck to the tea factory, which is worked entirely by automatic machinery. Macerators bruise the tea and let it oxidize, and endless belts go through the drying ovens. The factory is operated almost entirely by women. The director is a woman, and the tasters. Women work the machines where the tea is macerated and oxidized, and women tend the big ovens where the tea is dried. Women grade and pack it. The only men are those who move the crates of packaged tea.

  The director of the plant, a handsome woman of about forty-five, is a graduate of an agricultural school in her specialty. And her factory puts out many grades of tea, from the finest small top leaves to the bricks of tea which are sent out to Siberia. And since tea is the most important beverage of the Russian people, the tea gardens and the tea factories are considered one of the most important industries of the region.

  When we left, the director gave each of us a large package of the finest product of the region, and it was excellent tea. We had long since given up coffee, because what coffee there was, was not good. We had taken to drinking tea, and from now on we made our own tea for breakfast, and ours was much better than any we could have bought.

  We stopped at a little crèche where fifty or sixty tiny children were dancing on the green grass—the children of the women who were working in the tea fields. And Capa found a beautiful little girl, with long curls and huge eyes, and he wanted to photograph her, but she became embarrassed, and cried, and would not be comforted. He photographed a little boy, who cried too. Capa is the children’s friend. The teacher said that the girl was hard to comfort because she was not a Georgian child, she was a Ukrainian orphan who had been adopted by a Georgian family, and she felt strange because she could not speak the language yet. And many of the Georgian families have adopted children from the destroyed areas, for this rich country was not touched, and the people feel a responsibility toward the rest of the nation. Here and there we stopped at little houses to visit. And they had their gardens and their orchards around them. And in every place we ate a handful of hazelnuts or some country cheese and fresh black bread; a pear just picked from the tree over the house, or a bunch of grapes. We seemed to be eating constantly, and we could not refuse. And we tasted Georgian vodka, which we do not recommend to anyone, for it has a fuse in its tail. It is a veritable rocket of a drink, and our stomachs just couldn’t take it. Actually it is not vodka at all, but what we used to call grappa, that is distilled wine. It was much too violent for us.

  When our stomachs were beginning to bulge with food, the manager of the farm caught up with us. He was a tall, straight, spare man, in a partisan uniform and a stiff cap. He asked us to stop by at his house for a bite to eat, God help us! We explained, through Chmarsky and another interpreter, that about one more bite to eat and we would explode. It was returned to us that it was only a token bite, and that he would take it as a great courtesy if we would visit his house and have a glass of wine with him.

  We had just about begun to believe that Russia’s secret weapon, toward guests at least, is food. But we surely could not refuse to have a bite to eat and a glass of wine. And so we went with him to his house, a neat little house on a hill.

  And we should have known. There were more people standing about on the neat clipped grass of his yard than were justified by a simple bite to eat and a glass of wine. Two handsome girls came out of the house with jugs of water. They poured it over our hands, we washed our faces and hands. The girls held out white towels embr
oidered in red for us to dry ourselves.

  And then we were invited to step into the house. Through a hallway we went, and into a large room. The room was hung with woven materials in brilliant colors; some of the designs reminded us of Indian blanketry. The floor was covered with a kind of matting, rather like Mexican petate. It was the vision of the table that nearly killed us. It was about fourteen feet long, and it was loaded with food, and there were about twenty guests. I think it is the only meal or dinner we ever attended where fried chicken was an hors d’oeuvre, and where each hors d’oeuvre was half a chicken. It went from there to a cold boiled chicken over which was poured a cold green sauce, delicious with spices and sour cream. And then there were cheese sticks and tomato salads and Georgian pickles. And then there was a savory stew of lamb, with a thick sauce. And then there was a kind of fried country cheese. There were loaves of flat Georgian rye bread piled up like poker chips, and the center of the table was loaded with fruit, with grapes, and pears, and apples. And the frightful thing about it was that everything was delicious. The flavors were all new, and we wanted to taste all of them. And we were nearly dying of overeating. Capa, who prides himself on a thirty-two-inch waist, and who will not let out his belt, no matter what happens, was getting a puffed look under the chin, and his eyes were slightly popped and bloodshot. And I felt that if I could just go two or three days without eating anything, I might return to normal.

  I remembered and finally understood a story that had been told me by an Englishman. He was sent to America during the war on some kind of purchasing job, and he had headed toward the Middle West. And every place he went he was stuffed. He ate three and four dinners a day. His luncheons sank him, and between meals people slipped things into his mouth. They were sorry for him because there was so little food in England. They wanted to feed him up so that he could last a while just on his accumulated fat. At the end of three days he was ill, but he had to keep going. At the end of a week he was in desperate condition. His stomach, which was used to the austere food of England, was in complete revolt, and as he got sick the people got sorrier and sorrier for his hunger, and fed him more and more. At first, being an honest man, he tried to explain that so much food was killing him, but that was just disbelieved. And then he lied a little bit, and said he didn’t feel right about eating so much food when his people at home did not have such good things. And they laughed at him for that, and he had to go on eating. He said that at his approach to a farm the massacre of chickens was pitiful, and that he himself had found feathers on his razor when he shaved in the morning. At the end of a two weeks’ visit, he collapsed and was taken to a hospital where they pumped him out. And the doctor warned him that in his condition, even though he felt terribly hungry, he shouldn’t eat too much. And he laughed crazily, and turned over, and buried his head in the pillow. At the time I had thought this story was an overstatement, but more and more I was beginning to believe that it was an exact story.