I think I believe one thing powerfully—that the only creative thing our species has is the individual lonely mind. Two people can create a child but I know of no other thing created by a group. The group ungoverned by individual thinking is a horrible destructive principle. The great change in the last 2,000 years was the Christian idea that the individual soul was very precious.

In A Russian Journal, Steinbeck and Capa captured a few of those individual Russian souls who endured in a system ready to smother all creativity: “The Russians have been doing such bad things lately with their art stultification and their silly attacks on musicians and the decree about no Russian being allowed to speak to foreigners that it makes me sad,” Steinbeck wrote to a friend in February 1948. “And the small Russian people are such nice people.” That’s what this book still reminds its readers, a goal not so far distant from his efforts, ten long years earlier, to give human identity to the amorphous refugees from Oklahoma.

CHAPTER 2

FROM STOCKHOLM WE CABLED Joseph Newman, head of the Herald Tribune bureau in Moscow, our estimated time of arrival and settled back content that he would have a car to meet us and a hotel room to receive us. Our route was Stockholm to Helsinki, to Leningrad, to Moscow. We would have to pick up a Russian plane at Helsinki, since no foreign airline enters the Soviet Union. The Swedish airliner, polished, immaculate, and shining, took us across the Baltic and up the Gulf of Finland to Helsinki. And a very pretty Swedish stewardess gave us very nice little Swedish things to eat.

After a smooth and comfortable trip we landed in the new airport of Helsinki, the buildings recently completed and very grand. And there, in the restaurant, we sat down to wait for the arrival of the Russian plane. After about two hours the Russian plane came in, an old C-47, flying very low. Her brown war paint was still on. She hit the ground, her tail-wheel exploded, and she came leaping like a grasshopper up the runway on a flat tail-wheel. It was the only accident we saw during our trip, but, coming at this time, it did little to arouse our confidence. And her scarred and scratched brown paint, and her general appearance of unkemptness, did not contrast well with the brightly shining planes of the Finnish and Swedish airlines.

She bumped and bumbled up to the line, and out of her boiled a collection of American fur-buyers recently come from the auctions in Russia. A depressed and quiet group, who claimed the plane had flown not over a hundred meters high all the way from Moscow. One of the Russian crew climbed down, kicked the flat tail-wheel, and sauntered to the airport terminal. And very soon we were told that we would not take off that afternoon. We would have to go to Helsinki to spend the night.