One of the American correspondents told us that he had seen Stalin driven through the street one day, and he said he was sitting in the jump seat, and he was leaning back at a curious angle, and he looked very stiff. “I wondered at the time,” he said, “whether it was Stalin or whether it was a figure. He did not look natural.”

Capa brooded over his films every morning, and nearly every day we called Voks and asked what the procedure was going to be to get our films out, and every day we were told that they were working on it and we were not to worry. But we did worry, for we had heard all of the stories of how films are confiscated, and how none is ever allowed out. We had heard them, and I suppose unconsciously we believed them. On the other hand, Mr. Karaganov of Voks had not let us down once, and had not told us an untruth once. And so we depended upon him.

And now the Moscow Writers’ Union asked us to a dinner, and this worried us, for here would be all the intellectuals, all the writers whom Stalin has called “the architects of the Russian soul.” It was a terrifying prospect.

Our trip was almost done now, and we were a little frantic. We didn’t know whether we had got all the things we came for. There is only so much that one can do and see. Language difficulties were maddening. We had made contacts with many Russian people, but were the questions we had wanted answered actually answered? I had made notes of conversations, and of details, even of weather reports, for later sorting out. But we were too close to it. We didn’t know what we had. We knew nothing about the things American papers were howling about—Russian military preparations, atomic research, slave labor, the political skulduggery of the Kremlin—we had no information about these things. True, we had seen a great many German prisoners at work, cleaning up the wreckage their Army had created, and this did not seem too unjust to us. And the prisoners did not seem to us either overworked or underfed. But we have no data, of course. If there were large military preparations, we didn’t see them. There certainly were lots of soldiers. On the other hand, we had not come as spies.

At the last we tried to see everything in Moscow. We ran to schools, we spoke to businesswomen, actresses, students. We went to stores where the queues formed to buy everything. An issue of phonograph records would be announced and a line would form, and in a few hours the records would be sold out. The same thing happened when a new book went on sale. It seemed to us that clothing improved even in the two months we had been there, and at the same time the Moscow papers announced the lowering of prices on bread, vegetables, potatoes, and some textiles. There was always a rush on the stores, to buy almost anything that was offered. The Russian economy which had been turned almost exclusively to war production was slowly clanking into peacetime production, and a people which had been deprived of consumer goods, both needed and luxurious, crowded the stores to buy. When ice-cream got to a store, a line formed many blocks long. A man with a box of ice-cream would be rushed, and his goods sold so quickly that he could hardly take the money fast enough. The Russians love ice-cream, and there never was enough of it to go around.