A Russian Journal Read Online Free PDF

that happened under our windows. Across the street, on the second floor, there was a man who ran a kind of camera repair shop. He worked long hours on equipment. And we discovered late in the game that while we were photographing him, he was photographing us.
    Indeed, KGB files indicate that Soviet authorities scrutinized movements of the pair throughout the fully orchestrated trip; instructions were precise:
    Steinbeck is a man of conservative conviction and, in addition, he has recently become more right-wing oriented. That's why our approach to him should be especially cautious and we should avoid showing him something that can do us any harm.
    The KGB report from Kiev was dutiful:
    The task that the UOKS set for itself was to primarily show the visitors how the national economy and cultural valuables of the Ukrainian SSR were destroyed during the war and the great efforts of our people in restoration and reconstruction of the country.
    The bulk of the report summarizes events and speculates on the attitude of Steinbeck and Capa toward what they saw:
    I was with Capa when he took all of his pictures. He had an opportunity to take pictures depicting beggars, queues, German prisoners of war, and secret sites (i.e. the construction of the gas pipe-line). He did not take photos of this kind and approached picture-taking without reporter imprudence. Of the photos which cannot be considered favorably, I can point to only two: in the Museum of Ukranian Art, he took a picture of an emaciated woman-visitor, and on our way to the kolkhoz, he took a picture of a kolkhoz family wearing shabby clothes….
    However, a close scrutiny of relations between Steinbeck and Capa also forces us to stipulate that Capa is more loyally and friendly disposed to us. Steinbeck in an underhand way gave Capa instructions to look for vulnerable, in his opinion, aspects of our life.
    Steinbeck's frequent silences made officials uncomfortable. Capa's camera-he shot over four thousand photos-made them doubly uncomfortable.
    A Russian Journal
is an important book in the Steinbeck canon, much more so than has been acknowledged. Read for what it is, not for what it fails to do, Steinbeck's text sensitively captures a moment in Soviet history, as he intended. Steinbeck's carefully rendered vignettes, like Capa's photos, replicate his
    emotional response to a country and a people flattened by war, fed on propaganda, denied free speech, and convinced of the truth of their programmed responses. But they are people, always people.
    And the trip to Russia also marks a crucial stage in John Steinbeck's gradual shift from his 1930s commitment to group man to his subsequent concern with individual consciousness. In Russia, the group had subsumed individual creativity, thought, and action.
    “Wherever we went, the questions asked us had a certain likeness, and we gradually discovered that the questions all grew from a single source. The intellectuals of the Ukraine based their questions, both political and literary, on articles they had read in
Pravda . . .
we knew the articles on which they were based almost by heart." Steinbeck's fictional perspective was, in fact, shifting from the detached scientific viewpoint to the highly personal and moral stance given clear voice in his works after
A Russian Journal.
Immediately after his return he started thinking about his "long slow piece of work," the novel that would become
East of Eden
in five years, the study of individual moral choice. Traveling in Russia, he'd seen what a repressive regime could accomplish. In 1949, he wrote to John O'Hara:
    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