Reading several of these midcentury accounts undoubtedly supplements and enhances Steinbeck’s text. Journalist Marshall Mac-Duffie, in The Red Carpet: 10,000 Miles Through Russia on a Visa From Khrushchev, writes about a 1953 trip, with reflections on his earlier experience in Russia in 1946. Puzzling on why Russians fed visitors so lavishly, he writes about his 1946 visit:

We were members of an accredited diplomatic UN mission. Possibly they thought they had to entertain us. Secondly, there was a shortage of food. So, in a curious way, the giving of a formal dinner or putting on a spread assumed a special significance, as a gesture. Third, I often suspected that our visit was an excuse for local officials to throw one of their rare parties on the old expense account and get a little rich food otherwise unobtainable. Lastly, it has been long a Russian custom to entertain foreign visitors in such fashion…. Wherever our mission went, we encountered these relatively elaborate meals with the inevitable succession of numerous toasts.

Steinbeck and Capa were, of course, similarly feted, but Steinbeck eschews generalizations and analysis, opting for humor instead—particularly when seated at yet another dinner table: one Georgian banquet was 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’s this humorous eye that skewers Soviet excess, and the quick sympathy for the generosity behind it all—vintage Steinbeck material—that account for this book’s appeal.

A Russian Journal, the record of their forty-day trip to the Soviet Union between July 31 and mid-September 1947, was published in April 1948, after parts had been serialized in the New York Herald Tribune (beginning on January 14, 1948, and running on page 3 of the paper until January 31) and in the Ladies’ Home Journal (published in February). Like most of Steinbeck’s work after The Grapes of Wrath, it received decidedly mixed reviews. Writing for the Saturday Review, Louis Fischer panned it—excepting Capa’s “marvelous photographs.” Some felt that the text trivialized a profound topic, or added little to the readers’ knowledge of Russia, or rehashed what had already been written. “As books about Russia go,” wrote Orville Prescott for the New York Times, “‘A Russian Journal’ is a lot better written than most, but it is more superficial than many.” Sterling North concurred: “The question arises: how superficial can books about Russia become…. It could have been otherwise if the collaborators’ knowledge of Russia, their interest in Russia and their attitude toward Russia had been above the level of eating, drinking and observing pleasant surface impressions.” Steinbeck deliberately and consciously, of course, avoids historical context, political posturing, and in-depth analysis, as he reminds his readers throughout. And Capa reported later that, in fact, “on any occasion where questions were asked us about our feelings toward the policy of the United States Government we always stated emphatically that even if we were to disagree with some of its aspects, we would refuse to criticize it outside of the United States.” Writing one of the most thoughtful and sympathetic assessments, however, Victor Bernstein mused: “I am not at all certain that this abnegation of the interpreter’s role is justified merely because it is deliberate. It is an old, old fight in the theory and practice of journalism. How much of the unseen must go into a story to make it understandable, to get at its roots, to put it into perspective? How much of the unseen should Steinbeck put into his book to make it truly objective and not merely superficial?”