E. G.'s Reviews > A Russian Journal

"It will be necessary to say first how this story and how this trip started, and what its intention was. In late March, I, and the pronoun is used by special arrangement with John Gunther, was sitting in the bar of the Bedford Hotel on East Fortieth Street. A play I had written four times had melted and run out between my fingers. I sat on the bar stool wondering what to do next. At that moment Robert Capa came into the bar looking a little disconsolate. A poker game he had been nursing for several months had finally passed away. His book had gone to press and he found himself with nothing to do. Willy, the bartender, who is always sympathetic, suggested a Suissesse, a drink which Willy makes better than anybody else in the world. We were depressed, not so much by the news but by the handling of it. For news is no longer news, at least that part of it which draws the most attention. News has become a matter of punditry. A man sitting at a desk in Washington or New York reads the cables and rearranges them to fit his own mental pattern and his by-line. What we often read as news now is not news at all but the opinion of one of half a dozen pundits as to what that news means.
Willy set the two pale green Suissesses in front of us and we began to discuss what there was left in the world that an honest and liberal man could do. In the papers every day there were thousands of words about Russia. What Stalin was thinking about, the plans of the Russian General Staff, the disposition of troops, experiments with atomic weapons and guided missiles, all of this by people who had not been there, and whose sources were not above reproach. And it occurred to us that there were some things that nobody wrote about Russia, and they were the things that interested us most of all. What do the people wear there? What do they serve at dinner? Do they have parties? What food is there? How do they make love, and how do they die? What do they talk about? Do they dance, and sing, and play? Do the children go to school? It seemed to us that it might be a good thing to find out these things, to photograph them, and to write about them. Russian politics are important just as ours are, but there must be the great other side there, just as there is here. There must be a private life of the Russian people, and that we could not read about because no one wrote about it, and no one photographed it.
Willy mixed another Suissesse, and he agreed with us that he might be interested in such things too, and that this was the kind of thing that he would like to read. And so we decided to try it---to do a simple reporting job backed up with photographs. We would work together. We would avoid politics and the larger issues. We would stay away from the Kremlin, from military men and from military plans. We wanted to get to the Russian people if we could. It must be admitted that we did not know whether we could or not, and when we spoke to friends about it they were quite sure we couldn't.
We made our plans in this way: If we could do it, it would be good, and a good story. And if we couldn't do it, we would have a story too, the story of not being able to do it. With this in mind we called George Cornish at the Herald Tribune, had lunch with him, and told him our project. He agreed that it would be a good thing to do and offered to help us in any way.
Together we decided on several things: We should not go in with chips on our shoulders and we should try to be neither critical nor favorable. We would try to do honest reporting, to set down what we saw and heard without editorial comment, without drawing conclusions about things we didn't know sufficiently, and without becoming angry at the delays of bureaucracy. We knew there would be many things we couldn't understand, many things we wouldn't like, many things that would make us uncomfortable. This is always true of a foreign country. But we determined that if there should be criticism, it would be criticism of the thing after seeing it, not before.
In due time our application for visas went to Moscow, and within a reasonable time mine came through. I went over to the Russian Consulate in New York, and the Consul General said, 'We agree that this is a good thing to do, but why do you have to take a cameraman? We have lots of cameramen in the Soviet Union.'
And I replied, 'But you have no Capas. If the thing is to be done at all, it must be done as a whole, as a collaboration.'
There was some reluctance about letting a cameraman into the Soviet Union, and none about letting me in, and this seemed strange to us, for censorship can control film, but it cannot control the mind of an observer. Here we must explain something that we found to be true during our whole trip. The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled, for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument, and a man with a camera is suspected and watched wherever he goes. And if you do not believe this, try to take your Brownie No. 4 anywhere near Oak Ridge, or the Panama Canal, or near any one of a hundred of our experimental areas. In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so.
I don't think Capa and I really ever thought that we would be able to do the job we wanted to do. That we were able to do it is as much a surprise to us as to anyone else. We were surprised when our visas came through, and we held a mild celebration with Willy behind the bar when they did. At that point I had an accident and broke my leg and was laid up for two months. But Capa went about assembling his equipment.
There had been no camera coverage of the Soviet Union by an American for many years, so Capa provided the very best of photographic equipment and duplicated all of it in case some of it might be lost. He took the Contax and Rolleiflex that he had used during the war, of course, but he took extras also. He took so many extras, and so much film, and so many lights, that his overweight charge on the overseas airline was something like three hundred dollars.
The moment it became known we were going to the Soviet Union we were bombarded with advice, with admonitions and with warnings, it must be said, mostly from people who had never been there.
An elderly woman told us in accents of dread, 'Why, you'll disappear, you'll disappear as soon as you cross the border!'
And we replied, in the interest of accurate reporting, 'Do you know anyone who has disappeared?'
'No,' she said, 'I don't personally know anyone, but plenty of people have disappeared.'
And we said, 'That might very well be true, we don't know, but can you give us the name of anyone who has disappeared? Do you know anyone who knows anyone who has disappeared?'
And she replied, 'Thousands have disappeared.'
And a man with knowing eyebrows and a quizzical look, the same man, in fact, who two years before had given the total battle plans for the invasion of Normandy in the Stork Club, said to us, 'Well you must stand in pretty good with the Kremlin or they wouldn't let you in. They must have bought you.'
We said, 'No, not as far as we know, they haven't bought us. We would just like to do a job of reporting.'
He raised his eyes and squinted at us. And he believes what he believes, and the man who knew Eisenhower's mind two years ago knows Stalin's mind now.
An elderly gentleman nodded his head at us and said, 'They'll torture you, that's what they'll do; they'll just take you into a black prison and they'll torture you. They'll twist your arms and they'll starve you until you're ready to say anything they want you to say.'
We asked, 'Why? What for? What purpose could it serve?'
'They do that to everybody,' he said. 'Why I was reading a book the other day---'
A businessman of considerable importance said to us, 'Going to Moscow, huh? Take a few bombs and drop them on the Red sons-of-bitches.'
We were smothered in advice. We were told the food to take, otherwise we would starve; what lines of communications to leave open; secret methods of getting our stuff out. And the hardest thing in the world to explain was that all we wanted to do was to report what Russian people were like, and what they wore, and how they acted, what the farmers talked about, and what they were doing about rebuilding the destroyed parts of their country. This was the hardest thing in the world to explain. We found that thousands of people were suffering from acute Moscowitis---a state which permits the belief of any absurdity and the shoving away of any facts. Eventually, of course, we found that the Russians are suffering from Washingtonitis, the same disease. We discovered that just as we are growing horns and tails on the Russians, so the Russians are growing horns and tails on us.
A cab driver said, 'Them Russians, they bathe together, men and women, without no clothes on.'
'Do they?'
'Sure they do,' he said. 'That ain't moral.'
It developed on questioning that he had read an account of a Finnish steam bath. But he was pretty upset at the Russians about it.
After listening to all this information we came to the conclusion that the world of Sir John Mandeville has by no means disappeared, that the world of two-headed men and flying serpents has not disappeared. And, indeed, while we were away the flying saucers appeared, which do nothing to overturn our thesis. And it seems to us now the most dangerous tendency in the world is the desire to believe a rumor rather than to pin down a fact.
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."