A Russian Journal

"Since we have come back from Russia, probably the remark we have heard most is 'I guess they put on a show for you; I guess they really fixed it up for you. They didn't show you the real thing.' The people in this village did put on a show for us. They put on the same kind of show a Kansas farmer would put on for a guest. They did the same thing that our people do." (pg. 78)

A sort of proto-counterpart to his later Travels with Charley, in which John Steinbeck went on a road trip across the United States in order to 'find the country and its people', A Russian Journal sees the author go on a ramble across the Soviet Union in the company of the war photographer Robert Capa, at a time (1947) when tensions between his country and theirs show more were particularly high. His intentions are explained thus to the Russian censor: "our project, which was to avoid politics, but to try to talk to and understand Russian farmers, and working people, and market people, to see how they lived, and to try to tell our people about it, so that some kind of common understanding might be reached" (pg. 24).

As the above run-in with the censor indicates, one major difference between A Russian Journal and Travels with Charley is that this time it is Steinbeck, not the poodle Charley, who is on a short leash. The book suffers from the inevitable restrictions that the Soviet authorities place on his movements, his reportage and on Capa's photography. It is always in the back of the reader's mind that he is being shown the model village, the most curated people, the propagandistic gloss. Steinbeck is aware of this too, and unlike his later adventure across the United States, he is here not trying to find the country, but trying to just find something. As he writes, this is not the Russian story, but merely a Russian story (pg. 8).

That he does find something is to his great credit, and despite the restrictions placed on its author, A Russian Journal is a charming read. It lacks the magic that Steinbeck was later able to bring to Travels with Charley, and he never really delivers to us a feel for Moscow, but the book has its highlights, from the witty farm-lady with her line about cucumbers (pg. 75) to the party in vibrant Georgia ("I recall group singing in the street finally, and that the militia came to see what the singing was about, and joined the chorus" (pg. 185)). On multiple occasions he witnesses German prisoners set to work rebuilding the country they had tried to salt and burn so virulently, and one of the keenest impressions in A Russian Journal is the devastation wrought by World War Two just a few years earlier, and the indomitability of the Soviet inhabitants in the face of it. In one of the most arresting passages, Steinbeck witnesses first-hand the apocalyptic ruins of Stalingrad; an apocalypse not caused by the sort of nuclear weapons that Russia and the USA were now training on each other, but one caused by a relentless attrition of bullets and explosives and primitive brawling.

More accurately 'A Soviet Journal' than 'A Russian Journal', Steinbeck spends some time in Kiev and witnesses the destruction wrought on the Ukraine: "If the United States were completely destroyed from New York to Kansas, we would have about the area of destruction the Ukraine has… There are mines which will never be opened because the Germans threw thousands of bodies down into the shafts" (pp56-7). Reading the book in February 2022, the great elephant in the room is of course that Ukraine is no longer in union, Soviet or otherwise, with Russia. Quite the opposite, in fact, for as I write Western nations are urging their citizens to leave Ukraine in anticipation of an imminent Russian invasion. But, tragically, this is nothing new to the region. When an American diplomat reads aloud fitting passages about Russia from books written in 1634 and 1661, which Steinbeck believes are contemporary impressions (pp192-3), we realise these two could just as readily be having the same conversation in 2022.

Similarly, when Steinbeck writes that news is no longer news but opinion and punditry (pg. 3), and that "the most dangerous tendency in the world is the desire to believe a rumour rather than to pin down a fact" (pg. 7), he could be writing a daily brief in one of the few corners of 2022 that still allows for moments of sanity. He desires to avoid politics completely in his Russian journal and, both then and now, the appeal of this approach is obvious. What does emerge is the general decency of the people he meets, regardless of their perspectives and circumstances, and it is one of the great qualities of Steinbeck that you can trace this in all of his writing. Steinbeck's is fine observational writing, and when we consider the various petty prejudices, pomposities and perspectives that many people cling to as they navigate their lives, we see that this simple and seemingly common quality is in fact often depressingly rare, and should be cherished.

"Probably the hardest thing in the world for a man is the simple observation and acceptance of what is. Always we warp our pictures with what we hoped, expected, or were afraid of." (pg. 33) show less

This book reminded me why I love Steinbeck's books so much. His tone, his warm and quiet humour, his ability to be wise without being a cultural snob, his humanity. For me he is the best writer ever. And his journal from his trip , together with Robert Capa, to Russia right after WWII, is a very, very good read. Most readers of Steinbeck skip his non-fiction. My strong advice: Don't... And even if you're not already a Steinbeck fan, read it anyway. A Russian Journal is a rare glimpse of Stalin's Russia as seen through the eyes of two rather apolitical artists meeting the Russian people. not the rulers.

All sorts of interesting information about post-war life in the Soviet Union is packed into this short book. It's a unique history, an eye-witness account of everyday life in a nation devastated by war but determined to recover on its own. Writer/journalist John Steinbeck and photojournalist Robert Capa travelled to the Soviet Union in 1947, barely two years after the end of WWII.

Steinbeck explained the venture:

…[I]t occurred to us that there were some things that nobody wrote about Russia, and they were the things that interested us most of all. What do the people wear there? What do they serve at dinner?...What do they talk about? Do they dance, and sing, and play?...There must be a private life of the Russian people, and that we

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could not read about because no one wrote about it, and no one photographed it.

Under Stalin, the country was secretive, welcoming neither purposeful visitors nor random tourists.
Getting visas was a long and deliberately frustrating process, but the two journalists did get them, ultimately spending time in Moscow and Stalingrad, in Kiev and at collective farms in the Ukraine, and several places in Georgia.

Delays, mix-ups and misunderstandings, postponements and cancellations, and bureaucratic snarls were commonplace. No flying after dark; public transit unreliable. The pair couldn't go anywhere unaccompanied, but because they were under the aegis of VOKS, a Soviet agency promoting international cultural contact between writers, artists, and others, they had far more freedom than members of the international press corps (whose every dispatch was censored). Capa had to get official credentials before he was allowed to photograph anything, and even then, he was held up time and again by individual policemen who, studying his permit and questioning its validity, called in colleagues patrolling the neighborhood to consult. The usual judgment of the men on the spot was to call headquarters and wait until a higher-up arrived. He would arrive, okay the permit, and chat for a time with the foreigner. Even with a permit, photographing industrial operations--even the most commonplace--was not allowed.

When they did get out and about, always with a VOKS interpreter and guide, they visited stores and shops, ate in restaurants, toured museums, and tried to just chat with people. Moscow, their initial destination, was relatively untouched by the war; the Nazis got swallowed up by the Russian winter before they got to the Russian capital. Nevertheless, the Muscovites were uniformly glum, unsmiling, and humorless. In Stalingrad and Kiev, on the other hand, cities absolutely flattened by the Germans, the residents were friendly, smiling and laughing, voluble, living amongst the rubble and making do.

In the farmlands of the Ukraine, the Soviet "breadbasket," they visited collective farms, worked primarily by women, old men, boys, and a few former soldiers, most of them disabled. Many of the able-bodied men were victims of the war. Livestock had been slaughtered by the Nazis, and mechanical equipment destroyed. Two years later, the farm communities were still struggling to rebuild their herds and awaiting a tractor or two to expedite both planting and harvest. Like their urban countrymen, the farmers were friendly, good-humored, living with what they had, making do, looking to the future.

The biggest fear of the Russians, in both city and country, was of another war.

Steinbeck didn't say this in so many words, but you gather that life in the Soviet Union was not markedly different from life in central and western European countries. Nevertheless, the official line belied this judgment; access to the country was limited, and reports were closely controlled and rigorously censored. I don't think Steinbeck ever used the term "totalitarian." But he was conscious of the image of Stalin everywhere.

To Americans, with their fear and hatred of power in­vested in one man, and of perpetuation of power, this is a frightening thing and a distasteful one…[T]he pictures of Stalin outgrow every bound of rea­son....Every public building carries monster portraits of him. We spoke of this to a number of Russians and had several answers [ none particularly satisfying]....Whatever the rea­son is, one spends no moment except under the smiling, or pensive, or stern eye of Stalin. It is one of those things an American is incapable of understanding emotionally.

I did enjoy reading Steinbeck's "journal" and viewing Capa's photos. Working with a mass-market paperback failed to present the latter to good advantage. Images too small, clumsily cropped, shadow detail lost in black. Happily, all 69 photos published in the book can be viewed at the Magnum Photos website: https://pro.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=2TYRYDIPUATU show less

A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck of all people. I picked it up because Travels with Charley is a favorite of mine so I thought, oh, I like Steinbeck's travel writing! But he's a bit of an ass in this book. The trip was a somewhat impromptu affair, the idea of which came from a conversation in a bar when Steinbeck and a few other literary/intelligentsia types started wondering about what "real Russians" were like. They were conscious, even at this time just post WWII, that the picture they received of the Soviet Union was highly skewed and politicized:

"In the papers every day were thousands of words about Russia..What Stalin was thinking about, the plans of the Russian General Staff, the disposition of troops, experiments with atomic show more weapons...all of this by people who had not been there, and whose sources were not above reproach. And it occurred to us that there were some things that nobody wrote about Russia, and they were the things that interested us most of all. What do the people wear there? What do they serve at dinner? Do they have parties?...How do they make love, and how do they die? What do they talk about?

etc, etc. It's a series of very naive and condescending questions, but it prompted enough interest to organize a trip as a kind of cultural exchange. Steinbeck et al deliberately traveled without journalist credentials, which would have put them under the oversight of the Foreign Office. Instead, they ended up under the care of various cultural departments and writers' unions, which minimized their interactions with state security services, but also meant they had to navigate some truly labyrinthine bureaucracy.

It is the "et al" of the group that is of most interest here, because one of the people traveling with Steinbeck was Robert Capa. As a documentation of "real Russia" Steinbeck's account is not much of a success -- he spends more time talking about the travel conditions and the inconveniences of idiosyncratic plumbing than he does talking about, or to, those real Russians. However, Capa's photographs, which illustrate the book, more than make up for it. They are a wonder. And frankly, they rescue the text from its often petulant myopia.

The best section is the time they spend at several collective farms in the Ukraine and Georgia, where Steinbeck forgets himself enough to really pay attention and talk to the people he encounters. And they talk to him, asking hundreds of questions about farming conditions and political ideas in the United States, most of which he doesn't know how to answer. In this section, Capa's photographs show people working, or dancing, or baking bread, and and they are smiling and proud everyone is barefoot since shoes are too rare to use in the fields:

There was one woman, with an engaging ace and a great laugh, whom Capa picked out for a portrait. She was the village wit. She said, "I am not only a great worker, I am twice widowed, and many men are afraid of me now.." And she shook a cucumber in the lens of Capa's camera.

And Capa said, "Perhaps you'd like to marry me now?"

She rolled back her head and howled with laughter. "Now you, look!" she said. "If God had consulted the cucumber before he made man, there would be less unhappy women in the world."

And all in all, despite Steinbeck's general self-absorption, there does emerge a picture of the nascent Soviet Union, before the terrible realities of the Stalinist regime had fully taken hold or the extent of its crimes had come to light. Steinbeck's account lacks this looming cloud of historical hindsight. Instead this is an account of a Russia that -- infrastructure issues and bureaucratic red tape not withstanding -- had won a war at great cost and whose people were throwing themselves into building a new world. show less

This travelogue is obviously going to be dated in details and colloquialisms. However, it works fine as a history of post-WII attitudes, both American and Soviet.

Cappa's pictures were familiar to me. They were typical of pictures of the USSR shown to children in my day. The pictures, snapped in the late 1940s and shown to children in the 1960s, were a nice bit of propaganda. I suppose it was meant to show how behind the Soviets were in technology. At least the Soviets took up-to-date pictures in Times Square to show how decadent we all were.

In my journey to read all things Steinbeck (I'm well over half way now) I have a brief layover in Russia. Steinbeck visited Soviet Russia in 1947 accompanied by photographer Robert Capa. The fact one of America's most prized writers at the time was allowed into the Soviet Union with an acclaimed photojournalist astonishes me. This was the beginning of the so-called cold war; the United States' challenges toward Russia were growing, Russia's distrust of America was strong. So Steinbeck makes it into Russia and he does what he knows best, he gets amongst the people. He journeys from Moscow to war-torn Stalingrad; he visits the farmers and townsfolk of Ukraine and Georgia. His intention is to get to know the people and report honestly, show more without making conclusions, without editorial comment. He succeeds. The Russians aren't war-crazy peasants who live in constant fear of Stalin. They're simple, warmhearted, hard-working people who live in fear of another world war brought on by the divide between capitalist nations and communist nations. Of course Steinbeck's efforts only fueled the suspicion that Steinbeck himself was a socialist, a belief that had been running strong since The Grapes of Wrath was first published.

What I found most interesting about A Russian Journal was not so much what Steinbeck said, as what he didn't say. He spends considerable time talking about the food and the work-ethic of Russian people, as well as their pleasant demeanor. But he also spends a lot of time complaining about flights, talking about the beauty of the women, drinking, and seeming uncharacteristically crabby. He never addresses any personal issues in the book, rarely even mentions himself. Having gotten to know the author as well as one can an author from an earlier time, I couldn't help but feel like something was amiss. I suspected problems at home, and I ventured to guess they had something to do with Gwyn, Steinbeck's second wife and the model for Cathy Ames (East of Eden). After finishing A Russian Journal I did a little research and learned that Steinbeck was indeed in his final year of marriage with Gwyn. While I can't say for sure that marital issues may have fueled his temperament—nor can I say for sure Steinbeck was out of character—it seems the logical factor to deduce.

What does any of this have to do with the book? I think it affects the quality greatly. I could be wrong, but I got the feeling that Steinbeck didn't utilize his time in Russia very well. I get the feeling he spent more time brooding about Gwyn and partying with fellow American dignitaries that he didn't have much time in the field. This is a work that could have been immensely eye-opening, but it's rather light in the end. And perhaps none of this has to do with Steinbeck's personal life. Maybe he really was a communist sympathizer, and the lack of material has more to do with his covert training sessions and debriefing meetings. But I could be wrong. show less

I liken this bit of photo-journalism to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Rather than Parisian cafe's Steinbeck and photographer Robert Capa travel to and within Russia in 1947 with the intent to debunk misconceptions about Russian people held by Americans at that time. To capture the typical, everyday life of Russians; the type of food they eat, clothes they wear and schools they attend, all while keeping a perfectly neutral view.
Steinbeck and Capa traveled to Moscow, Ukraine, Stalingrad and Tiflis, Georgia. Along the way they were treated generously by farmhands and sometimes suspiciously by others but always with an over abundance of food, vodka and wine. Their conversations were enlightening and their fears similar to those back home. show more
Steinbeck's conclusion is heartfelt and just as relevant 70's years hence as he states, "...the most dangerous tendency in the world is the desire to believe a rumor rather than to pin down a fact." show less