Someone important in the government was there, but we couldn’t see him, whoever he was, for the state box was on our side of the stadium. In fact we have almost a record. In the whole time we were in Russia we didn’t see one single important person. Stalin had not come up to the celebration from his place on the Black Sea.

The show in the stadium went on all afternoon. There were parades of bicycles, and races of motorcycles, and finally there was a last show that required a great deal of preparation. A line of motorcycles rode around the track. In the seat was the motorcycle driver, and standing on each motorcycle was a girl in tights, and each girl held a great red flag, so that when the motorcycles went at full speed, the huge flag flapped behind. This parade circled the track twice, and that was the end of the show.

We started back from the Dynamo Stadium because I had to do my Tribune piece for Joe Newman, and Capa had to get back into the crowds to keep his camera clicking. And halfway back we blew a tire, and we had to walk the rest of the way. Capa got caught in the crowd, and I didn’t see him until much later. I finally made it to the Tribune office, did my piece, and sent it over to the censor.

We had dinner that night with Mr. and Mrs. Louis Aragon, who were at the National Hotel. They had a room with a balcony that overlooked the huge square in back of the Kremlin. From there we could see the fireworks which went off almost constantly, and we could hear the salutes of artillery that continued at intervals all evening. The square in front of us was one packed mass of people. There must have been millions of them, milling slowly and eddying back and forth across the square. In the middle of the square there was a bandstand where speeches were made, and music played, and there were singers and dancers. The only place we have ever seen people so closely packed together is in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

It was very late at night before we could even force our way through the people back to our hotel. And many hundreds of thousands of peoples still trudged through the streets, back and forth, looking at the lights and watching the electrical displays.

I went to bed, but Capa put his hundreds of rolls of film away, and got out his negatives, and when I went to sleep he was still staring at the light through his negatives, complaining bitterly that nothing had gone well. He had discovered that one of the cameras he had been using all day had developed a light leak, and he thought that all of his films were probably ruined. This did not make him a very happy man, and I was so sorry for him that I determined not to ask him a single intellectual question the next morning.