Delegations from many countries were arriving almost hourly. The busses and trains were loaded. The roads were full of people coming into the city, carrying not only their clothes, but food for several days. They have been hungry so often that they take no chances when they move, and everyone carries a few loaves of bread. Bunting and flags and paper flowers were on every building. The individual commissariats had their signs on the buildings housing their offices. The subway trust put up a huge map of the subways of Moscow, and at the bottom a little subway train that ran back and forth. This attracted crowds, who stared at it all day and late into the night. Wagons and trucks loaded with foodstuffs, with cabbages, with melons, with tomatoes, with cucumbers, rolled into the city—the gifts of the collective farms to the city on its eight-hundredth anniversary.

Everyone in the street wore some medal, or ribbon, or decoration reminiscent of the war. The city boiled with activity.

I went over to the Herald Tribune office and found a note from Sweet Joe Newman. He was held up in Stockholm, and he asked me to cover the party for the Herald Tribune, since he couldn’t get back to do it.

Capa was working feverishly over his films, criticizing his work himself, the quality of the developing, everything. He had an enormous number of negatives by now, and he spent hours in front of the window, looking through the negatives, and bitching badly. Nothing was correct, nothing was right.

We called Mr. Karaganov at the Voks office and asked him to find out exactly what we had to do to get the films out of Russia. We thought there might be some censorship, and we wanted to know what it was enough in advance so that we could make preparations for it. He assured us that he would go to work on it immediately and would let us know.

On the night before the celebration we were invited to the Bolshoi Theater, but we weren’t told what it would be. By some fortunate accident we were unable to go. We heard later that it was six hours of speeches, and no one could leave, for there were members of the government in the government box. It was one of the happiest accidents that ever happened to us.

The restaurants and cabarets were packed with people, and many of them were set aside for the delegates who had come from the other republics of the Soviet Union and from other countries, so that we couldn’t get in at all. As a matter of fact it was very difficult to get dinner that night. The city was simply mobbed with people, and they walked slowly about the streets, stopping in one square to listen for a while to the music, and then trudging on to another square. They looked, and trudged, and looked. The country people were wide-eyed. Some of them had never seen the city before, and no one had ever seen the city so lighted up. There was some dancing in the squares, but not a great deal. Mostly the people trudged and stared, and trudged on and stared at something else. The museums were so packed that you couldn’t get in at all. The theaters were mobbed. There was no building on which there was not at least one huge picture of Stalin, and the picture second in size was that of Molotov. Then there were huge portraits of the presidents of the different republics, and of the other heroes of the Soviet Union, their size graduated down.