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.