When we registered at the Savoy Hotel we were issued ration tickets, three for each day, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. By using these tickets in the ration restaurant in the hotel we could eat quite reasonably. If we wanted to eat in a commercial restaurant, the food was very expensive, and not very much better. The beer was sour, and very expensive. It averaged about a dollar and a half a bottle.

In the afternoon Voks sent a car to take us to the main office for an interview. It was our impression that there had been some battle about who was to be responsible for us, the Writer’s Union or Voks. And Voks had lost and got us. The Voks offices are in a beautiful little palace, which was once the home of a merchant prince. We were received by Mr. Karaganov in his office, which is oak-paneled to the ceiling and has a stained-glass skylight—a very pleasant place to work. Mr. Karaganov, a young blond, careful man, who spoke a precise, slow English, sat behind his desk and asked us many questions. He doodled on a pad with a pencil, one end of which was blue and the other red. And we explained our project, which was to avoid politics, but to try to talk to and to understand Russian farmers, and working people, and market people, to see how they lived, and to try to tell our people about it, so that some kind of common understanding might be reached. He listened quietly and made angular marks with his pencil.

Then he said, “There have been other people who wanted to do this.” And he named a number of Americans who have since written books about the Soviet Union. “They have sat in this office,” he said, “and have spoken in one way, and then they have gone home and have written in another way. And if we seem to have a mild distrust, it is because of this.”

“You must not think that we came either favorably or unfavorably,” we replied. “We came to do a job of reporting, if it is possible to do it. We intend to set down and to photograph exactly what we see and hear, with no editorial comment. If there is something we don’t like, or don’t understand, we will set that down too. But we came for a story. If we can do the story we came for, we will do it. If we can’t do it, we still have a story.”

He nodded very slowly and thoughtfully. “This we could trust,” he said. “But we are very tired of people who come here and are violently pro-Russian, and who go back to the United States and become violently anti-Russian. We have had considerable experience with that kind.

“This office, Voks,” he continued, “has not very much power, nor very much influence. But we will do what we can to let you do the work that you want to do.” Then he asked us many questions about America. He said, “Many of your newspapers are speaking of war with the Soviet Union. Do the American people want war with the Soviet Union?