A Russian Journal

by John Steinbeck

  Like all tourists, we made the trip to the little town of Klin, seventy kilometers from Moscow, to visit the home of Tchaikovsky. It is a pretty house, set in a large garden. The lower floors are now used as library, as storehouse for music manuscripts, and as a museum. But the upper floor where the composer lived has been left just as it was. His bedroom is as he left it—a big dressing gown hanging beside the narrow iron cot, a small writing table under a window. The ornate dressing table and mirror with the drape of heavy paisley presented to him by a feminine admirer stands in a corner, with his hair tonic still on it. And his living-room with the grand piano, the only one he ever owned, has not been changed. Even his desk has his little cigars in a bowl, and his pipes, and stubs of pencil. The pictures of his family are on the walls, and out on a little glass porch where he took his tea there is a clean sheet of music manuscript paper. His nephew is the curator—a handsome old man now.

  He said, “We want to make Tchaikovsky’s house seem as though he has just stepped out for a walk and would soon return.”

  This old man lives mostly in the past. He spoke of the musical giants as though they were still alive—of Moussorgsky, and Rimski-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky, and the rest of the great group. And the house was indeed full of the presence of the composer. The piano is tuned and played once a year. It is played by the best pianist available, and the music is recorded. Mr. Tchaikovsky, the nephew, played for us for a while, and the piano was mellow and a little out of tune.

  We looked at the manuscripts in the library. The notes are stabbed on the paper, cutting into the staffs with a terrible haste, and whole sections are crossed out. And on some pages only eight bars remain, and the rest are viciously eliminated with a destroying pencil. And then we looked at the manuscripts of other composers, neatly inked, no note crossed out. But Tchaikovsky wrote as though every day might be his last, and every note. He was frantic to get his music down.

  The old man sat with us in the garden later, and we spoke of the composers of the present day, and he said a little sadly, “Competent men, yes; good craftsmen, yes; honest and intelligent men, yes; but not genuises, not genuises.” He looked down the long garden where Tchaikovsky had walked every day, winter or summer, after he had finished his daily work.

  The Germans had come to this pleasant house, and they had made a motor pool of it, and tanks were in the garden. But the nephew had moved the precious manuscripts in the library, and the pictures, even the piano, safely away before the Germans came. And now it is all back—a strange, haunted place. From the window of the caretaker’s cottage came the notes of someone practicing on a piano, the exercises of a child, hesitant and stumbling, and the strange and passionate loneliness of the frantic little man who lived exclusively for music filled the garden.

  Our time was growing very short. Our lives had become jerky. We rushed from one thing to another, trying to see everything in our last few days. We visited the University of Moscow, and the undergraduates did not look unlike ours. They congregated in the halls, and laughed, and rushed from class to class. They paired off, boy and girl, just as ours do. The university was bombed during the war, and the students rebuilt it while the war went on, so that it was never closed.

  The ballet had opened, and we went nearly every night—the loveliest ballet we have ever seen. It started at seven-thirty and did not finish until after eleven. The casts were huge. A commercial theater could not support such ballet. Such performance, and training, and sets, and music, must be subsidized or they cannot exist. There is no way to make the sale of tickets pay for this kind of production.

  We also went to the Moscow Art Theater, and saw Simonov’s play The Russian Question. And perhaps we made a mistake in seeing this play, or perhaps this production was not of the best. We found it, for our taste, overacted, overemphasized, unreal, and stylized—in a word, hammy. The character of the American publisher would have reduced an American audience to helpless laughter, and the Russian idea of American newspapermen was only slightly less fantastic than Ben Hecht’s. But this play has been unbelievably successful. And its picture of American journalism is taken as absolute truth by nearly all of its audiences. We wish we could have seen other plays, and other casts, to see whether overemphasis is general, but there was no time. We can only say that by New York standards The Russian Question is not good.

  Mr. Simonov is without question the most popular writer in the Soviet Union today. His poems are known and recited by the whole population. His war reporting was as generally read as Ernie Pyle’s was in America. And he himself is a very charming man. He invited us to his country house. It is a simple, comfortable little house, set in a large garden. There he and his wife live quietly. His house is not luxurious, it is very easy. We had an excellent lunch. He loves fine cars, and he has a Cadillac and a jeep. His vegetable garden, orchard, and poultry-yard furnish his table. He seems to live a good, simple, comfortable life. He has his enemies of course, of the kind drawn against him by his popularity. He is the darling of the government, and has been decorated many times, and he is generally beloved by the Russian people.

  He and his wife were charming and kind. We liked them very much. And as with all professionals, our criticism of his play had no personal emphasis. We played darts later on, and danced, and sang. And we went back to Moscow very late at night.

  Moscow was still in a flurry of activity, for all of the great portraits, and the flags, and the buntings had to come down quickly, before rain should set in, or the color would run. They had to be used again for the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the November Revolution. This is a big year for celebration in Moscow. The lights on the buildings, and on the Kremlin, and on the bridges were left up, because the rain could not hurt them, and they too would be needed again on the seventh of November.

  We had wanted to see the inside of the Kremlin, everyone does, and we had even wanted to photograph it, and finally our permission came through, but the permission to photograph could not be arranged. No pictures could be taken, no cameras could be carried inside. We did not get the special tour, but only the usual tourists’ route. However, that was what we wanted. Mr. Chmarsky was our guide again, and oddly enough Mr. Chmarsky had never been inside the Kremlin either. It is not a permission readily granted.

  We approached the long, heavily guarded causeway. There were soldiers at the entrance. Our names were taken, and our permissions scrutinized, and then a bell rang and a military escort went with us through the gate. We didn’t go to the side where the government offices are. We walked inside the huge place, past the old cathedrals which have been there for so long, and we went through the museums in the giant palace which was used by so many czars, from Ivan the Terrible on. We went into the tiny bedroom that Ivan used, and into the little withdrawing rooms, and the private chapels. And they are very beautiful, and strange, and ancient, and they are kept just as they were. And we saw the museum where the armor, the plate, the weapons, the china services, the costumes, and the royal gifts for five hundred years are stored. There were huge crowns covered with diamonds and emeralds, there was the big sledge of Catherine the Great. We saw the fur garments and the fantastic armor of the old boyars. There were the gifts sent by other royal houses to the czars—a great silver dog sent by Queen Elizabeth, presents of German silver and china from Frederick the Great to Catherine, the swords of honor, the incredible claptrap of monarchy.

  It became apparent, after looking at a royal museum, that bad taste, far from being undesirable in royalty, is an absolute necessity.

  We saw the painted hall of the warriors of Ivan where no woman was permitted to enter. We climbed miles of royal staircases, and looked into the great halls of mirrors. And we saw the suite where the last czar and his family had lived, uncomfortably amidst too much furniture, too much decoration, and too much dark polished wood. For a child to have to grow up and live with all of this monstrous collection of nonsense must have made a certain kind of adult out of him, and one
can understand more readily the character of princes after seeing the kind of life they must have lived in the midst of all this mess. When the little czarevitch wanted a gun, could he have a twenty-two rifle? No, he had a little blunderbuss handmade of silver, with pieces of ivory driven into it, with jewels for sights—an anachronism in the twentieth century. And he couldn’t go out and hunt rabbits, he sat on the lawn and swans were driven by for him to shoot at.

  Just two hours in this royal place so depressed us that we couldn’t shake it all day. What must a lifetime in it have done! Anyway, we saw it, and I suppose we are glad, but horses couldn’t drag either of us back. It is the most gloomy place in the world. And it was easy to imagine while walking through these halls and these staircases how murder could rise so easily, how father could kill son and son father, and how any real external life could become so remote as to be nonexistent. From the windows of the palace we could look over the walls of the Kremlin, out to the city, and we could imagine how these imprisoned monarchs must have felt toward the city. Directly below us in Red Square was the great marble stand where they used to cut off the heads of their subjects, probably out of their own terror. We walked down a long ramp and out of the heavily guarded gate with a sense of relief.

  We ran away from that place and back to the Metropole Hotel, to the Herald Tribune offices, and we grabbed Sweet Joe Newman, and went down to the cabaret, and ordered four hundred grams of vodka and a huge lunch. But it took a long time to get over the feeling the Kremlin had put upon us.

  We never did see the government offices which are on the other side. That is a place where tourists are never taken, and we don’t even know what it looked like, except for the tops of the buildings which could be seen over the wall. But we were told that a whole community lives in there. Some of the high government officials have apartments there, and their servants; and the caretakers, the maintenance crews, and the guards, all live inside the walls. Stalin, however, we were told, does not live in the Kremlin, but has an apartment somewhere, and no one seems to know where it is, and no one seems to pay much attention to where it is. Mostly now though, it is said, he lives on the Black Sea, in a climate of perpetual summer.

  One of the American correspondents told us that he had seen Stalin driven through the street one day, and he said he was sitting in the jump seat, and he was leaning back at a curious angle, and he looked very stiff. “I wondered at the time,” he said, “whether it was Stalin or whether it was a figure. He did not look natural.”

  Capa brooded over his films every morning, and nearly every day we called Voks and asked what the procedure was going to be to get our films out, and every day we were told that they were working on it and we were not to worry. But we did worry, for we had heard all of the stories of how films are confiscated, and how none is ever allowed out. We had heard them, and I suppose unconsciously we believed them. On the other hand, Mr. Karaganov of Voks had not let us down once, and had not told us an untruth once. And so we depended upon him.

  And now the Moscow Writers’ Union asked us to a dinner, and this worried us, for here would be all the intellectuals, all the writers whom Stalin has called “the architects of the Russian soul.” It was a terrifying prospect.

  Our trip was almost done now, and we were a little frantic. We didn’t know whether we had got all the things we came for. There is only so much that one can do and see. Language difficulties were maddening. We had made contacts with many Russian people, but were the questions we had wanted answered actually answered? I had made notes of conversations, and of details, even of weather reports, for later sorting out. But we were too close to it. We didn’t know what we had. We knew nothing about the things American papers were howling about—Russian military preparations, atomic research, slave labor, the political skulduggery of the Kremlin—we had no information about these things. True, we had seen a great many German prisoners at work, cleaning up the wreckage their Army had created, and this did not seem too unjust to us. And the prisoners did not seem to us either overworked or underfed. But we have no data, of course. If there were large military preparations, we didn’t see them. There certainly were lots of soldiers. On the other hand, we had not come as spies.

  At the last we tried to see everything in Moscow. We ran to schools, we spoke to businesswomen, actresses, students. We went to stores where the queues formed to buy everything. An issue of phonograph records would be announced and a line would form, and in a few hours the records would be sold out. The same thing happened when a new book went on sale. It seemed to us that clothing improved even in the two months we had been there, and at the same time the Moscow papers announced the lowering of prices on bread, vegetables, potatoes, and some textiles. There was always a rush on the stores, to buy almost anything that was offered. The Russian economy which had been turned almost exclusively to war production was slowly clanking into peacetime production, and a people which had been deprived of consumer goods, both needed and luxurious, crowded the stores to buy. When ice-cream got to a store, a line formed many blocks long. A man with a box of ice-cream would be rushed, and his goods sold so quickly that he could hardly take the money fast enough. The Russians love ice-cream, and there never was enough of it to go around.

  Every day Capa inquired about his pictures. He had nearly four thousand negatives by now, and he was worrying himself sick. And every day we were told that it would be all right, that the rule was in process of being arrived at.

  The dinner given us by the Moscow writers was held at a Georgian restaurant. There were about thirty writers and officials of the Union there, among them Simonov and Ilya Ehrenburg. By this time I had reached a point where I could not drink vodka at all. My system revolted against it. But the dry Georgian wines were delicious. The kinds of wines had numbers. Thus one got to know that number sixty would be a heavy red wine, number thirty a thin white wine. These numbers are not correct, but we found that number forty-five, a dry, light, fine-tasting red wine was good for us, and we always ordered it. There was a comparatively dry champagne that was good too. The restaurant had a Georgian orchestra and some dancers, and the food was the same as in Georgia—for our taste, the best in Russia.

  We were all dressed up in our best clothes, and ours were pretty beat up and sloppy. In fact we were a disgrace, and Sweet Lana was getting to be a little ashamed of us. There were no dinner clothes. In fact, in the circles we traveled in we never saw dinner clothes. Perhaps the diplomats have them, we don’t know.

  The speeches at this dinner were long and complicated. Most of the people at the table had some language beside Russian, either English, or French, or German. They hoped we had enjoyed our stay in their country. They hoped we had got the information we came to get. They drank our health again and again. We answered that we had not come to inspect the political system, but to see ordinary Russian people; that we had seen many of them, and we hoped we could tell the objective truth about what we had seen. Ehrenburg got up and said that if we could do that they would be more than happy. A man at the end of the table then got up and said that there were several kinds of truth, and that we must tell a truth which would further good relations between the Russian and the American people.

  And that started the fight. Ehrenburg leaped up and made a savage speech. He said that to tell a writer what to write was an insult. He said that if a writer had a reputation for being truthful, then no suggestion should be offered. He shook his finger in his colleague’s face and told him in effect that his manners were bad. Simonov instantly backed Ehrenburg, and denounced the first speaker, who defended himself feebly. Mr. Chmarsky tried to make a speech, but the argument went on and drowned him out. We had always heard that the party line was so strict among writers that no argument was permitted. The spirit at this dinner did not make this seem at all true. Mr. Karaganov made a conciliatory speech, and the dinner settled down.

  My abandoning of vodka in the toasts and the substitution of wine made me much happier in the stomach, a
lthough I probably was regarded as a weakling, but I was a healthier weakling. Vodka just didn’t agree with me. The dinner concluded about eleven o’clock in good feeling. No one else ventured to tell us what to write.

  Our passage was booked now. We were to leave in three days, and still there was no clearance of our pictures. Capa was a brooding mass of unhappiness. The people at the American Embassy and the correspondents had been so kind to us that we felt we ought to give a cocktail party. Poor Stevens of the Christian Science Monitor had one of the few houses in Moscow. The rest lived in hotels. So Stevens got chosen to give the party. There was not much he could do about it, even if he had wanted to. We made a guest list and found that at least a hundred people had to be invited, and Stevens’s living-room could comfortably hold about twenty. But there was no help for that. We thought perhaps some wouldn’t come, but we were wrong. A hundred and fifty came. Parties are very desirable things in Moscow. It was a gay party too, but there wasn’t much drinking. The room was so crowded that you could hardly get your arm up to your mouth, and once you did you couldn’t get it down again. Stevens never got to see much of his party; quite early he got trapped in a corner, and he never escaped from it.

  Our profound thanks are due to the Embassy staff and the correspondents. They gave us every possible help and encouragement. And we think they are doing a very good job under trying and difficult conditions. For one thing, they are not losing their heads as so many people are in the world. It is probably the touchiest political scene in the world today, and far from the most pleasant. Our compliments go to the whole group, from the Ambassador to the T/5 who was rewiring the Embassy.

  We were to leave on Sunday morning. On Friday night we went to the ballet at the Bolshoi Theater. When we came out there was a rush telephone call for us. It was Mr. Karaganov of Voks. He had finally got word from the Foreign Office. Our films had to be developed and inspected, every single one of them, before they could leave the country. He would put a crew to work developing the pictures—three thousand pictures. We wondered how it could have been done if we had had to do it at this last moment. They did not know that all the pictures had already been developed. Capa packed up all his negatives, and early in the morning a messenger came for them. He spent a day of agony. He paced about, clucking like a mother hen who has lost her babies. He made plans, he would not leave the country without his films. He would cancel his reservation. He would not agree to have the films sent after him. He grunted and paced the room. He washed his hair two or three times and forgot to take a bath at all. He could have had a baby with half the trouble and pain. My notes were not even requested. It wouldn’t have made much difference if they had been, no one could have read them. I have trouble reading them myself.