We went to the Soviet Union with the finest equipment of rumors that has ever been assembled in one place. And in this piece we insist on one thing: if we set down a rumor, it will be called a rumor.

We had a final Suissesse with Willy at the Bedford bar. Willy had become a full-time partner in our project, and meanwhile his Suissesses got better and better. He gave us advice, some of the best advice we had from anyone. Willy would have liked to come with us. And it might have been a good thing if he had. He made us a super Suissesse, had one himself, and we were finally ready to go.

Willy said, “Behind the bar you learn to listen a lot and not talk very much.”

We thought about Willy and his Suissesses a lot during the next few months.

That was the way it started. Capa came back with about four thousand negatives, and I with several hundred pages of notes. We have wondered how to set this trip down and, after much discussion, have decided to write it as it happened, day by day, experience by experience, and sight by sight, without departmentalizing. We shall write what we saw and heard. I know that this is contrary to a large part of modern journalism, but for that very reason it might be a relief.

This is just what happened to us. It is not the Russian story, but simply a Russian story.

INTRODUCTION

IN 1946, WINSTON CHURCHILL announced that an “Iron Curtain” had been drawn closed across Eastern Europe. In the winter of 1947, the cold war began in earnest. The Soviet Union, fierce ally of the United States in World War II, had become a menacing presence, a foe barely understood. “In the papers every day,” John Steinbeck begins his text, “there were thousands of words about Russia,” and yet, he continues, “there were some things that nobody wrote about Russia, and these were the things that interested us most of all.” His quest, and that of photographer Robert Capa who accompanied him, was to discover the “great other side,” the “private life of the Russian people.” Steinbeck and Capa’s modest book about the lives of Russians, A Russian Journal, published in 1948, attempts only “honest reporting, to set down what we saw and heard without editorial comment, without drawing conclusions about things we didn’t know sufficiently.”

In many ways, that is what John Steinbeck had been doing quite successfully for twenty years, writing books about ordinary people: paisanos, Oklahoma migrants, enlisted men in World War II, Mexican peasants. A Russian Journal does not sound the epic chords of The Grapes of Wrath, certainly, but it has some of that book’s empathy and humanity. Indeed, one explanation for the appeal of A Russian Journal is that this book, unlike so many other accounts of Russia published at the time, engages and informs in Steinbeck’s most characteristic manner: expressing empathy and understanding for working people; capturing with a journalist’s eye the telling detail; seeing “nonteleologically,” recording merely what is witnessed; and finally leavening the narrative with a wry humor absent in many more ponderous contemporary accounts of travel through Soviet-approved locales. If not the most erudite or wide-ranging book about postwar Russia, Steinbeck and Capa’s is just what they claimed for it: “It is not the Russian story, but simply a Russian story.”