A Russian Journal Part 2

We liked Karaganov very much. He was a man who spoke straight and unconfusedly. Later we were to hear many flowery speeches and many generalities. But this we never heard from Karaganov. We never pretended to him that we were anything but what we were. We had a certain outlook, an American viewpoint, and possibly to him certain prejudices. Far from disliking us, or distrusting us because of this, he seemed to trust us more. During our stay in the Soviet Union he was of great help to us. We saw him a number of times, and his one request of us was, "Just tell the truth, just tell what you see. Don't change it, put it down as it is, and we will be very glad. For we distrust flattery." He seemed to us an honest and a good man.

The silent fight was still going on concerning our trip. At the present time one can go to the Soviet Union only as a guest of some organization, or to do some particular job. We were not sure whether the Writers' Union or Voks was sponsoring us, and we were not sure that they knew either. It may be that each was trying to move this dubious honor on to the other. One thing we were sure of, we did not want to become accredited as regular correspondents, with correspondents' credentials, for in that case we should have been under the sponsorship and control of the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office rules are very strict regarding correspondents, and if we once became their babies, we could not have left Moscow without special permission, which is rarely granted. We could not have traveled with any freedom, and our material would have been subject to Foreign Office censorship. These things we did not want, for we had already talked to the American and British correspondents in Moscow, and we had found that their reporting activities were more or less limited to the translation of Russian daily papers and magazines, and the transmission of their translations, and even then censorship quite often cut large pieces out of their cables. And some of the censorship was completely ridiculous. Once, one American correspondent, in describing the city of Moscow, said that the Kremlin is triangular in shape. He found this piece of information cut out of his copy. Indeed, there were no censorship rules on which one could depend, but the older correspondents, the ones who had been in Moscow a long time, knew approximately what they could and could not get through. That eternal battle between correspondents and censor goes on.

There is a famous story of a new ground mole, and it goes like this: A civil engineer invented a ditch-digging, or tunnel-digging, machine called a ground mole. Pictures of it and specifications appeared in a Soviet scientific magazine. This was picked up by an American magazine and was printed. A British newspaper, seeing the article, wired its correspondent in Moscow to get a story on the ground mole. Whereupon the British correspondent went to the Soviet scientific journal, dug out the material, and sent it to its paper, only to find the whole story killed by censorship. This happened a number of months ago, and, as far as I know, the story is still held up in censorship.

The correspondents were further inhibited by a fairly new decree, which makes the divulgence of agricultural, industrial, or population figures equally treasonable with the divulgence of military information. The result is that one can get no figures at all concerning any Russian production. Everything is dealt with in percentages. Without a base figure, this leaves you about where you started. For example, you cannot be told how many units are turned out by a certain tractor factory, but you can be told that it is, say, ninety-five per cent of the 1939 level. If you know how many units were turned out in 1939, your figure is likely to be accurate, but if you have no other figure you are lost. In some cases this whole thing is ridiculous. If, for example, one asks what the present population of Stalingrad is, one would be told that it is eighty-seven per cent of the pre-war figure. The process then is to look up the population pre-war and compute the number of people now living in Stalingrad.

A constant double talk warfare goes on between the Moscow correspondents and the censorship office, and we did not want to become involved in it.

At this point Joe Newman returned from his junket to the fur auctions in Leningrad. In addition to being a good friend, Joe is a very effective man. He was trained in j.a.pan and in Argentina, and this training makes him particularly fit for the Moscow scene. He has an easy quality from long experience in countries where directness is highly uncommon; he has grown sensitive to nuances and to suggestions. He can read the meaning behind meanings, and besides this he is a relaxed man. You have to be in this job, or you very soon go crazy. We are greatly indebted to him for the information and training he gave us.

We called at the American Emba.s.sy, and it is different from any I have ever seen. Whereas in most emba.s.sies the line of American tourists and visitors is interminable, at the Moscow Emba.s.sy practically no one calls. There is no one to call. There are no tourists. Very few Americans go to Moscow. And while we have a fairly large staff in Moscow, they are limited more or less to a.s.sociating with one another and with members of other emba.s.sies. For the a.s.sociation of foreigners with Russians is rather limited. There is no question, in this period of tension, that Russians do not like to be seen with members of the American Emba.s.sy, and this is fairly understandable. One member of our Emba.s.sy explained it to me in this way. He said that he had been speaking with a State Department man who had come to Moscow and who complained that he was not able to get in touch with Russian people. The Emba.s.sy man said, "Well, let's suppose that in Washington you heard that one of your secretaries was going out with somebody from the Russian Emba.s.sy. What would you do?" And the State Department man replied, "Why, I'd fire her, immediately." And the Emba.s.sy man said, "Well, you see, maybe the Russians feel the same way."

General Smith, the American Amba.s.sador, asked us to dinner, and we found him an intelligent and careful man, who desperately tried to do the best he could for the relations of the two countries. And it must be admitted that he is working under great difficulties. For the diplomatic services of foreign countries are under the same restrictions as the correspondents. They are not permitted to leave Moscow, they cannot travel about the country, and their access to the homes of Russians is highly limited. It is not that there is anything said, it is just that one is not invited. And if one invites a Russian something usually happens. He is ill, or he cannot come, or he is not in town. This is unfortunate, but true. And it is equally unfortunate that in America the same thing may be, to a certain extent, true.

It is our belief that the Russians are the worst propagandists, the worst public relations people, in the world. Let us take the example of the foreign correspondents. Usually a newspaperman goes to Moscow full of good will and a desire to understand what he sees. He promptly finds himself inhibited and not able to do the work of a newspaperman. Gradually he begins to turn in mood, and gradually he begins to hate the system, not as a system, but simply because it keeps him from doing his work. There is no quicker way of turning a man against anything. And this newspaperman usually ends up nervous and mean, because he has not been able to accomplish what he was sent to do. A man who is unable to function in his job usually detests the cause of his failure to function. The Emba.s.sy people and the correspondents feel alone, feel cut off; they are island people in the midst of Russia, and it is no wonder that they become lonely and bitter.

This section on Foreign Office accreditation is put in in justice to the regular Moscow correspondents. We were able to do many things they are not permitted to do. But if it had been part of our job to report news as they must, then we would have been taken under the Foreign Office, and we too could not have left Moscow.

Now Voks a.s.signed an interpreter to us, and an interpreter was very necessary, for we could not even read a street sign. Our interpreter was a young, small, and quite pretty girl. Her English was excellent. She was a graduate student at the University of Moscow, in American history. She was quick and sharp and tough, and a daughter of a colonel in the Soviet Army. She was of great help to us, not only because she knew the city thoroughly and was able to get things done with great efficiency, but also because in conversation she gave us an idea of what the young people, at least of Moscow, were thinking and talking about. Her name was Svetlana Litvinova. Her first name was p.r.o.nounced Sweet Lana, and this name so charmed us that we decided that it should be spread. We tried Sweet General Smith, and Sweet Harry Truman, and Sweet Carrie Chapman Catt, and none of them seemed to work. Finally we hit upon Sweet Joe Newman, and this seemed to be permanent. He is still known as Sweet Joe.

Sweet Lana was a dynamo of energy and efficiency. She got cars for us. She took us to see the things we wanted to see. She was a determined little girl, and her opinions were as determined as she was. She detested modern art of all kinds. The abstractionists were decadent Americans; the experimenters in painting were decadent too; Pica.s.so nauseated her; the crazy mural in our bedroom she described as an example of decadent American art. The only painting she really liked was nineteenth-century representational photographic painting. We found that this was not her own personal view, but was general. We do not think that there is any actual pressure put upon a painter. But if he wants his pictures hung in the state galleries, and that is the only kind of gallery that exists, then he will paint photographic paintings. He will, publicly at least, not experiment with color and line, invent no new techniques, use no subjective approach to his job. Sweet Lana was vehement on this subject. And she was vehement on most subjects. It was through her that we learned of the wave of morality that is upon the young people of the Soviet Union. It is somewhat like the morality of an American small town a generation ago. Nice girls are not seen in night clubs. Nice girls do not smoke. Nice girls do not use lipstick or nail polish. Nice girls dress very conservatively. Nice girls do not drink. And nice girls are very circ.u.mspect with their boy friends. Sweet Lana was so moral that she made us, who had never thought of ourselves as being very immoral, feel rather bawdy. We like a well made-up woman, and we have a critical eye for a well-turned ankle. We lean toward mascara and eye-shadow. We like swing music and scat singing, and we love the pretty legs in a chorus line. These were all decadent things to Sweet Lana. These were the products of decadent capitalism. And this att.i.tude was not limited to Sweet Lana. It was true of most of the young people we met. And it was interesting to us that the att.i.tudes of our most conservative and old-fashioned groups are found in the att.i.tudes of the young people of the Soviet Union.

Sweet Lana was very trim and neat, and her clothes were well made, simple and well fitting. And when occasionally she had to conduct us to a theater or to a ballet, she wore a little veil on her hat. During the time we were in the Soviet Union Sweet Lana grew a little less apprehensive of our decadence. And when finally we were leaving, on our last night, there was a little party, and Sweet Lana said, "I've conducted many people around, but I never had any fun before."

Her study of American history at the University had been exhaustive, and in the Soviet manner scientific. She knew things about American history that we had never heard of, but she knew it, of course, always in terms of Marxist criticism, so that events that we did know about had a strange and foreign sound when they came from her. It is very highly possible that our knowledge of Russian history would have the same sound to her ears. Slowly I think she came to like us a little, in spite of our decadence. For one thing, we were a little different from most tourists with whom she had come in contact. And once in a while the deep seriousness of Soviet young people tipped over in Sweet Lana and she had a little non-decadent fun too.

We were anxious to know about this state of mind, and gradually it became a little clear to us. Soviet young people are trained to feel that there is so much work to be done, more work than they can ever accomplish, that there is not much time for play. The compet.i.tion among them is constant. One takes examinations for schools, and the highest grade wins; the highest grade gets the scholarship. There are always more applicants for the universities than there are places, so that the compet.i.tion is very keen. And everywhere the honors and the emoluments go to the most effective person. There is no such thing as reliance on past performance, or on the performance of your father or grandfather. One's position is entirely dependent on one's own intelligence and one's own effort. And if this method makes Soviet youngsters seem a little tense and humorless, it also makes them work very hard.

Sweet Lana took us out to the Lenin Hills, and we stood on that eminence that overlooks the whole city and saw Moscow stretching to the horizon, a huge city. There were black piled clouds in the sky, but the sun shone underneath and glittered on the golden domes of the Kremlin. It is a city of great new buildings, and little old wooden houses with wooden lace around the windows, a curious, moody city, full of character. There are no figures as to its population now, but it is said to have between six and seven millions.

We drove slowly back into town. The ditches were full of growing cabbages, and the sides of the road were planted with potatoes. What we knew as victory gardens are continued now, and will continue. Everyone has his little plot of cabbages and potatoes, and the protection of these plots is ferocious. While we were in Moscow two women were sentenced to ten years of hard labor for stealing three pounds of potatoes from a private garden.

As we drove back toward Moscow a great black cloud turned over, and the rain began to fall on the city.

Probably the hardest thing in the world for a man is the simple observation and acceptance of what is. Always we warp our pictures with what we hoped, expected, or were afraid of. In Russia we saw many things that did not agree with what we had expected, and for this reason it is very good to have photographs, because a camera has no preconceptions, it simply sets down what it sees.

We had to wait about Moscow for our permits to leave the city and to travel through the country.

We went, on invitation, to see the temporary head of the press bureau. He was dressed in a gray uniform with the square shoulder boards of the Foreign Office. His eyes were bright blue, like turquoises.

Capa spoke fervently about taking pictures. So far he had not been able to. The chief of the press bureau a.s.sured us that he would do his best to get the permits for photography as soon as possible. Our meeting was formal and very courteous.

Later we went to visit the Lenin Museum. Room after room of the sc.r.a.ps of a man's life. I suppose there is no more doc.u.mented life in history. Lenin must have thrown nothing away. Rooms and cases are full of bits of his writings, bills, diaries, manifestoes, pamphlets; his pens and pencils, his scarves, his clothing, everything is there. And around the walls are huge paintings of every incident of his life, from his boyhood on. Every incident of the Revolution in which he took part is recorded in monster paintings around the wall. His books are sunk in white marble frames, about the walls also, and the t.i.tles are in bronze. There are statues of Lenin in every possible pose, and later, in the pictures of his life, Stalin enters. But in the whole museum there is not one picture of Trotsky. Trotsky, as far as Russian history is concerned, has ceased to exist, and in fact never did exist. This is a kind of historical approach which we cannot understand. This is history as we wish it might have been rather than as it was. For there is no doubt that Trotsky exerted a great historical effect on the Russian Revolution. There is also no doubt that his removal and his banishment were of great historical importance. But to the young Russians he never existed. To the children who go into the Lenin Museum and see the history of the Revolution there is no Trotsky, good or bad.

The museum was crowded. There were groups of Soviet soldiers; there were children; there were tourists from the various republics, and each group had its lecturer, and each lecturer had a pointer, with which he or she indicated the various subjects under discussion.

While we were there a long line of war orphans came in, little boys and girls from about six to thirteen, scrubbed and dressed in their best clothes. And they too went through the museum and gazed with wide eyes at this doc.u.mented life of the dead Lenin. They looked in wonder at his fur cap, and his fur-collared overcoat, at his shoes, the tables he wrote on, the chairs he sat in. Everything about this man is here, everything except humor. There is no evidence that he ever, in his whole life, had a light or a humorous thought, a moment of whole-hearted laughter, or an evening of fun. There can be no doubt that these things existed, but perhaps historically he is not permitted to have them.

In this museum one gets the idea that Lenin himself was aware of his place in history. Not only did he save every sc.r.a.p of his thinking and his writing, but the photographs of him are there by the hundreds. He was photographed everywhere, in all conditions, and at every age, almost as though he had antic.i.p.ated that there would someday be a museum called the Lenin Museum.

There is a hush over the place. People speak in whispers, and the lecturers with their pointers talk in a curious melodic litany. For this man has ceased to be a man in the Russian mind. He is no longer of flesh, but of stone, and bronze, and marble. The bald head and the pointed mustache are everywhere in the Soviet Union. The intent, squinting eyes look out of canvas and peep out of plaster.

In the evening we went to a party at the American club, a place where Emba.s.sy employees and soldiers and sailors from the Military and Naval Attaches offices go for recreation. There was a viperine punch, made of vodka and grapefruit juice, a fine reminder of prohibition days. A little swing band was led by Ed Gilmore, who is a swing aficionado. He once called his organization the Kremlin Krows, but since this name was slightly frowned on it was changed to the Moscow River Rats.

After the solemnity of the afternoon in the Lenin Museum the slight violence and noise and laughter of this party were a pleasure to us.

Among the girls at this party were a number of the now-famous wives of Americans and Britons who are not permitted to leave the Soviet Union. Pretty and rather sad girls. They cannot join their husbands in England or America, and so they are employed by their emba.s.sies until some final decision is reached.

There are many things we cannot understand about the Soviet Union, and this is one of them. There are not more than fifty of these women. They are no good to the Soviet Union. They are suspected. Russians do not a.s.sociate with them, and yet they are not permitted to leave. And on these fifty women, these fifty unimportant women, the Soviet Union has got itself more bad publicity than on any other single small item. Of course this situation cannot arise again, since by a new decree no Russian may marry a foreigner. But here they sit in Moscow, these sad women, no longer Russians, and they have not become British or American. And we cannot understand the reasoning which keeps them here. Perhaps it is just that the Russians do not intend to be told what to do about anything by anyone else. It might be as simple as that. When Clement Attlee personally requested that they be sent out of Russia, he was told, in effect, to mind his own business. It is just one more of the international stupidities which seem to be on the increase in the world. Sometimes it seems that the leaders of nations are little boys with chips on their shoulders, daring each other to knock them off.

It was a good party at the American club, a good noisy party, and it made us feel a little homesick. All of the people there were homesick too, for Russia is not very kind to foreigners, particularly if they happen to be employees of foreign governments. And although we had not been long in the Soviet Union, the lipstick, the mascara, and the colored nails of the girls looked good to us.

The following afternoon we went to the air show. While there were some civilian events, most of the show was given by the Soviet Air Force. Different branches of the Soviet armed forces have their days. There is Tank Day, Infantry Day, and Navy Day, and this was the Air Force Day. Since it was semi-military, we were told that no cameras would be permitted. This seemed a little ridiculous to us, because every military attache, from every emba.s.sy, would be there, people who really know about airplanes. We didn't know an airplane from a hole in the ground. It was very probable that every military attache would be sketching and understanding what he saw, and we wouldn't.

A car came for us. We went out a long avenue lined with flags, miles of them, red flags and Air Force flags. The highway was bordered with large portraits of Stalin, and Marx, and Lenin. Hundreds of thousands of people moved toward the airfield on trains and on busses, and other hundreds of thousands went on foot.

Our places were in the grandstand, which was a mistake. We should have been on the great green field where literally millions of people stood to watch the show. It was a hot day, and there was no cover from the sun. On the flat green field were pavilions where soft drinks were sold, and little cakes. When we were seated, a low hum started, and it grew to a great roaring. It was all of the people standing there greeting Stalin, who had just arrived. We couldn't see him, we couldn't see his box, because we were on the wrong side of the grandstand. The response to his arrival was not a cheer but a buzz, like that of millions of bees.

The show started almost at once. It began with civilian pilots, some from factories, some from flying clubs, some groups of women. They flew formations, intricate formations, and did it superbly. Long lines of planes played follow-the-leader, and made loops, and turns, and dives, one behind the other.

Then the military ships came in, and flew tight formations, threes, and fives, and sevens, wing to wing, activated as one plane. It was really magnificent flying, but it wasn't what the crowd had come to see. They had come to see the new models, the jets and rocket-boosted planes. And eventually these came. Some of them climbed almost perpendicularly into the sky, at great speed, with the rockets on their wing tips putting out a trail of white. And finally the jet ships came. And I don't know whether it was to confuse the observers or not, but they flew only about three hundred feet above the earth, and by the time we heard them they were almost gone, they zipped past and were gone. There seemed to be three or four new models. We have no idea of how they compare with other jet planes, they seemed very fast to us. Of all the ships in the whole show there were only two large ones which might be considered bombers.

Next there was a mock battle in the sky. Enemy ships came in, and defensive ships went up to meet them, while on the ground, far in the distance, batteries of anti-aircraft flashed and roared, and the whole field trembled with the reverberation. It was very theatrical, for here and there a ship would spout black smoke and flame and would go into a spin, and then from over the edge of the hills there would come a flash of calcium light, as though the plane had crashed and burned. It was a very effective piece of drama.

The last item of the show was the most spectacular of all. A large group of transport planes came over the field and suddenly each one spat out parachutes. There were at least five hundred in the air at once, and the parachutes were red, and green, and blue. The sun made them look like flowers in the air. They floated down to the field, and just before they landed each parachute sprouted a second parachute, so that the men landed standing up, and they did not tumble or roll.

The air show must have been practiced for many weeks, because its timing was perfect, there were no delays. One event followed directly on the heels of the other. When it was over, the hum of the crowd arose again, and a soft clapping from hundreds of thousands of people. It was Stalin going away, and we still didn't see him.

There are definite disadvantages to having the best seats in the grandstand, and we wished we had been out on the field, where the people sat on the gra.s.s, in comfort, and watched the show, and saw more than we did. We never made the mistake again of going any place V. I. P. It may be flattering to the ego, but you don't see as much.

The next morning our permits to photograph came through. Capa was at last to be turned loose with his cameras, and his fingers were itching. We wanted photographs of the rebuilding of Moscow, and of the frantic painting and repairing of buildings in preparation for the anniversary of the city's founding. Sweet Lana was to go with us as guide and interpreter.

Almost immediately we ran afoul of the general suspicion toward foreign photographers. We were photographing children playing in a pile of rubble. They were preoccupied with building, piling stones one on top of another, and moving dirt in little wagons, imitating what the adults were doing. Suddenly a policeman appeared. He was very polite. He wanted to see the permits to photograph. He read them but was not quite willing to go out on a limb for a little piece of paper. And so he took us to the nearest call box, where he called some kind of headquarters. Then we waited. We waited for half an hour until a car drove up, full of plain-clothes men. They read the letter of permission. Each one read it, and then they had a little conference; we don't know what they said, but then they telephoned again, and finally they all came back smiling, and they all touched their caps, and we were free to photograph in that neighborhood.

Then we moved to another part of the town, for we wanted photographs of the stores, the food shops, the clothing shops, the department stores. And again a very polite policeman approached, and read our permit, and he too went to a call box while we waited. And again a car with plain-clothes men came up, and they each read our permit, and they had a consultation, and they telephoned from the call box. It was the same thing. They came back smiling, and touched their caps, and we were free to photograph in that district.

This practice seems to be general in the Soviet Union. I suppose it is general any place where bureaus of the government operate. No one is willing to go out on any limb. No one is willing to say yes or no to a proposition. He must always go to someone higher. In this way he protects himself from criticism. Anyone who has had dealings with armies, or with governments, will recognize this story. The reaction to our cameras was invariably courteous, but very careful, and the camera did not click until the policeman was quite sure that everything was in order.

The food stores in Moscow are very large, and, as with the restaurants, there are two kinds: the ration stores, where food is very cheap if one has the ration tickets to get it; and the free stores, also operated by the government, where one can buy nearly anything in the way of food at very high prices. The canned goods are piled in mountains, the champagne and wine from Georgia are pyramided. We saw here some products which might have come from United States' stocks. There were cans of crab with j.a.panese marks still on them. There were German goods. And there were the luxury products of the Soviet Union itself-large cans of caviar, piles of sausages from the Ukraine, cheeses, salt fish, and even game, wild duck and woodc.o.c.k, bustard and rabbits and hares, small birds and a white bird that looks like a ptarmigan. There were smoked meats of all kind.

But this food is all luxury food. To the average Russian the important thing is the price of bread and its quant.i.ty, and the price of cabbage and potatoes. In a good year, such as this one, the prices of bread, cabbage, and potatoes come down, and this is the index of the success or failure of the crops.

The windows of the food stores, both ration and commercial, are filled with wax figures of the food sold inside. There are wax hams and bacons and sausages, wax quarters of beef, even wax cans of caviar.

We went next to the department stores, where clothing, shoes and stockings, suits and dresses, are sold. The quality was not very good, and the tailoring was not very good either. It is the principle of the Soviet Union to make utility goods as long as they are necessary, and to make no luxuries until utility goods have taken up the slack of need. There were print dresses, some woolen suits, and the prices seemed very high to us. But here we come to the danger of making general statements, for even during the short time we were in the Soviet Union prices came down and quality seemed to be improving. It seems to us that a thing which is true one day is untrue the next.

We went on to the commercial shops where secondhand goods are sold. These are specialty shops. One handles china and lamps, another deals in jewelry-antique jewelry since there is very little modern jewelry made-garnets and emeralds, earrings, rings, and bracelets. A third sells photographic supplies and cameras, mostly German cameras that have come back from the war. A fourth carries secondhand clothes and shoes. There are shops where the semi-precious stones from the Ural mountains are sold, the beryls, topazes, aquamarines.

Outside of these shops there is another kind of trading. If you come out of a camera shop, two or three rather furtive men will approach you, and each one carries a package, and in the package is a camera, a Contax, or Leica, or Rolleiflex. These men will give you a glimpse of the camera and tell you the price. The same thing happens outside jewelry shops. There is a man with a squib of newspaper. He opens it quickly, shows you a diamond ring, and mentions a price. What he is doing is probably illegal. The prices asked by these outside salesmen are, if anything, a little higher than the prices in the commercial shops.

There is always a great crowd in these shops, people who are not there to buy, but to watch others buy. If you look at an article, you are immediately overwhelmed by people who want to see, and want to see whether you will buy. It is a kind of theater to them, we think.

We went back to our green bedroom with its insane mural, and we were conscious of being depressed. We couldn't figure out exactly why, and then it came to us: there is very little laughter in the streets, and rarely any smiles. People walk, or rather scuttle along, with their heads down, and they don't smile. Perhaps it is that they work too hard, that they have to walk too far to get to the work they do. There seems to be a great seriousness in the streets, and perhaps this was always so, we don't know.

We had dinner with Sweet Joe Newman, and with John Walker of Time, and we asked them if they had noticed the lack of laughter. And they said they had. And they said that after a while the lack of laughter gets under your skin and you become serious yourself. They showed us a copy of the Soviet humorous magazine, called Krokodil, and translated some of the jokes. But they were not laughing jokes, they were sharp jokes, critical jokes. They were not for laughter, there was no gaiety in them. Sweet Joe said he had heard that outside of Moscow it was different, and this we subsequently discovered to be true. There is laughter in the country, in the Ukraine, and on the steppes, and in Georgia, but Moscow is a very serious city.

One of the correspondents was having trouble with his car and his chauffeur. He needed a car, and it is well for a foreigner in Moscow to have a Russian chauffeur. And it did not do him any good to change chauffeurs. His problem was this: his chauffeur drove him very well, but when he was not driving him, he was driving anyone else who was willing to pay a hundred roubles for a short trip. His chauffeur was getting very rich, and the car was taking a beating. There was nothing to do about it, for if he complained his chauffeur was likely to sulk a little bit, and when his chauffeur sulked, something went wrong with his car, and when something went wrong with his car, it was laid up in a garage for two or three weeks. It was better to keep his chauffeur happy if he wanted to be driven in his own car at all. He had tried getting other chauffeurs, but always the same thing happened.

In some cases the chauffeur problem becomes a little ridiculous. Ed Gilmore's chauffeur has a chauffeur of his own who drives him to work.

We wondered if these stories could be entirely true, and we were only finally convinced one day when a man rented us a whole bus. We had to get in from the airport quickly, and we had no choice but a bus. The trip cost us four hundred roubles. It was rather grand riding in from the airport, the two of us, in a bus made to seat thirty people.

It is possible that the chauffeurs of Moscow are very rich and happy people, but they are necessary, since it is difficult for a foreigner to get a driver's license. One correspondent took his examination for a license, but he failed on the question, "What does not belong on an automobile?" He could think of many things that did not belong on an automobile and finally picked one, but he was wrong. The proper answer was "mud."

That evening we saw the American picture Rhapsody in Blue at the Emba.s.sy. We had seen it before, but this version of it was much more amusing, because the reels got mixed up, and the picture opened with everybody dead; gradually they came to life, until at the end of the picture George Gershwin was a little boy. We liked it much better this way.

Capa constantly used the window of our hotel as a place from which to photograph people in the street. And he lurked behind the curtains with a long lens on his camera, taking portraits of people walking through the rain, and of people shopping at the little place across the street. And he and the man in the repair shop across the street continued their duel of snapping at each other with their cameras.

Neither of us had heard from home for a long time. Letters did not come through, and we decided we would try to telephone New York. This was very difficult, and we finally gave it up. One can telephone New York only if money is deposited to the Russian account in New York, in dollars. This would require that we telegraph someone in New York, say exactly the time we wanted to telephone, and exactly how long we wanted to talk. The cost of this would be computed and the dollars deposited in New York, at which time our telephone call could be put in from Moscow. But since this would take about a week or ten days to accomplish, we decided the simplest thing was just to continue to write letters, and to hope eventually to receive some.

When letters finally did begin to arrive, we found that airmail from New York to Moscow takes from ten days to three weeks. We do not know why it takes so long, for New York to Stockholm is two days, and the rest of the time is from Stockholm to Moscow. This delay of delivery adds to the foreigner's sense of being cut off, of being all alone.

We had begun to brood a little bit, for we had been a week in Moscow and our permits to leave the city had not come through. We thought we might spend the summer waiting for them when suddenly they materialized, and our plan was under way.

Sweet Joe Newman gave us a c.o.c.ktail party that lasted far into the night. Our plan was to leave at dawn for Kiev. The c.o.c.ktail party picked up our spirits, and the spirits of about fifty other people.

We found that there was one difficulty about traveling in the Soviet Union. You cannot go from Kiev to Stalingrad, or from Stalingrad to Stalino. You must come back to Moscow every time and go out again, for the transportation system operates out of Moscow like the spokes of a wheel; and the roads are so torn up by the war that to travel laterally is nearly impossible, besides taking more time than we thought we had. Another difficulty is that since the planes fly only in the daytime, and there is no night flying, they leave very early in the morning. And after Sweet Joe's c.o.c.ktail party, it seemed very early to us indeed.

CHAPTER 4.

SWEET LANA COULD NOT go to Kiev with us. Instead, Mr. Chmarsky went as interpreter and guide. A nice little man, and a student of American literature. His knowledge of English was highly academic. Capa, as usual, took liberties with his name and played tricks with it.

Chmarsky again and again would correct him, saying, "Mr. Capa, it is Chmarsky, not Chumarsky."

Whereupon Capa would say, "All right, Mr. Chomarsky."

"No, Mr. Capa, Chmarsky, not Chumarsky, not Chomarsky!"

That went on and on, and Capa joyfully found new p.r.o.nunciations of his name everyday. Chmarsky was always a little worried by our speech, the curious kind of American double talk that we used. For a while he tried to track it down, and eventually just gave up and did not listen. On certain occasions his plans for us did not materialize-cars ordered did not meet us, planes we met did not fly. And we came to call him the Kremlin gremlin.

"What are gremlins?" he asked.

We explained in detail the origin of gremlins, how they started in the R.A.F., and what their habits were. How they stopped engines in mid-air, iced wings, fouled gas lines.

He listened with great intent, and at the end he held up one finger and said, "In the Soviet Union we do not believe in ghosts." Perhaps we played too hard with him. We hope we did not hurt his feelings.

There is one thing that you can never tell, and that is what time a plane is going to fly. It is impossible to know in advance. But one thing you can know is that it will leave some time early in the morning. Another thing you can be sure of is that you must be at the airfield long before it does fly. Any time you are to take a trip, you must arrive at the airfield in the chilly dark before the dawn, and sit and drink tea for several hours before the plane leaves. At three o'clock in the morning the bell in our room rang, and we were not happy about getting up, for we had been to Sweet Joe's c.o.c.ktail party, and what we needed was about twelve hours' sleep, and we had had about one hour. We piled the equipment into the back of the car and drove through the deserted streets of Moscow into the country.

We now observed something that was to happen again and again. Drivers in the Soviet Union speed their cars, and then take them out of gear and let them coast. They take advantage of all hills to disengage their gears and coast. We were told that this saved gasoline, and that it is a part of the training of every driver. He is a.s.signed gasoline which is computed to cover a certain distance, and he must make it cover that distance. Consequently he uses every possible trick he can to make his gasoline last. It is just another part of the huge bookkeeping system which is the Soviet Union. It compares with the bookkeeping in the restaurants. The wear and tear on clutch and gear is not taken into consideration, and the saving of gasoline must be very small indeed. To us the practice was rather nerve-racking. The car speeds up to about sixty miles an hour, and then suddenly the clutch is disengaged, and it coasts until it is moving at a crawl. Then it jumps up to sixty miles an hour and coasts again.

In the pre-dawn the Moscow airport was crowded with people, for since all planes leave early in the morning, the pa.s.sengers begin to collect at the airport shortly after midnight. And they are dressed in all kinds of costumes. Some wear the furs which will protect them from the arctic climate of the White Sea or of northern Siberia; others are in the light clothing which is sufficient for the subtropical regions around the Black Sea. Six hours by air from Moscow you can find almost any climate available in the world.

Being the guests of Voks, we walked through the public waiting-room and into a side room where there was a dining table, some couches, and comfortable chairs. And there, under the stern eye of a painted Stalin, we drank strong tea until our plane was called.

In the large oil portrait of Stalin on the wall, he was dressed in military uniform and wearing all his decorations, and they are very many. At his throat the Gold Star, which is the highest decoration of Soviet Socialist Labor. On his left breast, highest up, the most coveted award of all, the Gold Star of a Hero of the Soviet Union, which corresponds to our Congressional Medal of Honor. Below that, a row of campaign medals, which indicate what actions he has been in. And on his right breast, a number of gold and red enamel stars. Instead of theater ribbons such as our troops wear, a medal is issued for each great engagement of the Soviet Army: Stalingrad, Moscow, Rostov, and so forth, and Stalin wears them all. As marshal of the Soviet armies he directed them all.

Here we may as well discuss something which bothers most Americans. Nothing in the Soviet Union goes on outside the vision of the plaster, bronze, painted, or embroidered eye of Stalin. His portrait hangs not only in every museum, but in every room of every museum. His statue marches in front of all public buildings. His bust is in front of all airports, railroad stations, bus stations. His bust is also in all schoolrooms, and his portrait is often directly behind his bust. In parks he sits on a plaster bench, discussing problems with Lenin. His picture in needlework is undertaken by the students of schools. The stores sell millions and millions of his face, and every house has at least one picture of him. Surely the painting and modeling, the casting, the forging, and the embroidering of Stalin must be one of the great industries of the Soviet Union. He is everywhere, he sees everything.

To Americans, with their fear and hatred of power invested in one man, and of perpetuation of power, this is a frightening thing and a distasteful one. At public celebrations the pictures of Stalin outgrow every bound of reason. They may be eight stories high and fifty feet wide. Every public building carries monster portraits of him.

We spoke of this to a number of Russians and had several answers. One was that the Russian people had been used to pictures of the czar and the czar's family, and when the czar was removed they needed something to subst.i.tute for him. Another was that the icon is a Russian habit of mind, and this was a kind of an icon. A third, that the Russians love Stalin so much that they want him ever present. A fourth, that Stalin himself does not like this and has asked that it be discontinued. But it seemed to us that Stalin's dislike for anything else causes its removal, but this is on the increase. Whatever the reason is, one spends no moment except under the smiling, or pensive, or stern eye of Stalin. It is one of those things an American is incapable of understanding emotionally. There are other pictures and other statues too. And one can tell approximately what the succession is by the size of the photographs and portraits of other leaders in relation to Stalin. Thus in 1936, the second largest picture to Stalin's was of Voroshilov, and now the second largest picture is invariably Molotov.

After four gla.s.ses of strong tea our plane was called, and we moved our pile of luggage up to it. Again it was an old brown C-47. People moved their bundles into the plane and piled them in the aisles. Everyone had brought food, loaves of black bread, and apples, and sausage and cheese, and smoked bacon. They always carry food, and we discovered that this was a very good idea. With a loaf of black rye bread in your bag you will not be hungry for two days if anything goes wrong. As usual, the air system did not work, and as soon as the doors were closed the plane became stuffy. There was a puzzling yeasty odor in the plane which I could not identify for a long time. But finally I discovered what it was. It is the odor of black rye bread on people's breaths. And after a while, when you eat the bread yourself, you grow used to it, and do not smell it at all.

Capa had provided books for the trip, and at that time I did not know how he got them. But it came out later that Capa is a thief of books. He calls it borrowing. Casually he puts books in his pocket, and if he is caught at it, he says, "I will return it, I am just borrowing it, I just want to read it." The book rarely gets returned.

He reached his high point with Ed Gilmore. Among the Moscow correspondents books are very precious, and the arrival of a shipment of detective stories or modern novels is an occasion for rejoicing and a time of happiness. It happened that Ed Gilmore had just received a new Ellery Queen. He was five chapters into it when we visited him, and naturally he laid his book aside to talk to us. When we had left he looked for his book and it was gone-Capa had borrowed it. If Capa had borrowed or stolen Ed's lovely wife, Tamara, Ed might have been more deeply shocked, but he could not have been angrier. And to this day I do not think he knows how the Ellery Queen came out. For some time Capa, who had heard rumors of the Gilmore wrath, showed a certain reluctance about seeing him again. Among Moscow correspondents, particularly in the winter, a code of honor has grown up, rather like the code which developed in the West concerning horses, and it is nearly a matter for lynching to steal a man's book. But Capa never learned and he never reformed. Right to the end of his Russian stay he stole books. He also steals women and cigarettes, but this can be more easily forgiven.

We tried to read a little on the plane, and promptly went to sleep. And when we were awakened, we were over the flat grainlands of the Ukraine, as flat as our Middle West, and almost as fruitful. The huge bread basket of Europe, the coveted land for centuries, the endless fields lay below us, yellow with wheat and rye, some of it already harvested, and some of it being harvested. There was no hill, no eminence of any kind. The flat stretched away to a round unbroken horizon. And streams and rivers snaked and twisted across the plain.

Near the villages there were the zigzags of trenches, and the scoops of sh.e.l.l holes where the fighting had taken place. There were roofless houses, and the black patches of burned buildings.

We seemed to fly endlessly over this flat plain. But at last we came to the Dnieper, and saw Kiev, on its cliff above the river, the only eminence for many miles around. We flew over the broken city and landed on the outskirts.

Everyone had told us it would be different once we got outside of Moscow, that the sternness and the tenseness would not exist. And this was true. On the airfield we were met by a number of Ukrainians from the local Voks. They were laughing people. They were more gay and more relaxed than the men we had met in Moscow. There was an openness and a heartiness about them. They were big men, nearly all blond, with gray eyes. They had a car ready to drive us into Kiev.

It must at one time have been a beautiful city. It is much older than Moscow. It is the mother of Russian cities. Seated on its hill beside the Dnieper, it spreads down into the plain. Its monasteries and fortresses and churches date from the eleventh century. It was once a favorite resort of the czars, and they had their vacation palaces here. Its public buildings were known all over Russia. It was a center of religion. And now it is a semi-ruin. Here the Germans showed what they could do. Every public building, every library, every theater, even the permanent circus, destroyed, not with gun-fire, not through fighting, but with fire and dynamite. Its university is burned and tumbled, its schools in ruins. This was not fighting, this was the crazy destruction of every cultural facility the city had, and nearly every beautiful building that had been put up during a thousand years. Here German culture did its work. And one of the few justices in the world is that German prisoners are helping to clean up the mess they made.

Our Ukrainian guide was Alexis Poltarazki, a large man, who limped a little from a wound received at Stalingrad. He is a Ukrainian writer, with a fine command of English, and a great sense of humor, a man of warmth and friendliness.

On the way to our hotel we noticed, as everyone does, that the Ukrainian girls are very pretty, mostly blond, with fine womanly figures. They have flair, they walk with a swinging stride, and they smile easily. While they were not better dressed than the women of Moscow, they seemed to carry their clothes better.

Although Kiev is greatly destroyed while Moscow is not, the people in Kiev did not seem to have the dead weariness of the Moscow people. They did not slouch when they walked, their shoulders were back, and they laughed in the streets. Of course this might be local, for the Ukrainians are not like the Russian; they are a separate species of Slav. And while most Ukrainians can speak and read Russian, their own language is a language apart and separate, nearer to the Southern Slavic languages than to Russian. Many Ukrainian words, particularly farm words, are the same as in Hungarian, and many of their words are duplicated in Czech rather than in Russian.

At the Intourist Hotel our Ukrainian hosts gave us a magnificent lunch. There were fresh ripe tomatoes and cuc.u.mbers, there were little pickled fishes, there were bowls of caviar, and there was vodka. We had small fried fishes from the Dnieper, and beefsteaks, beautifully cooked with Ukrainian herbs. There was wine from Georgia, and Ukrainian sausages which are delicious.

There was a fine feeling of friendship in these men. During lunch, they told us, with a great deal of amus.e.m.e.nt, about an American who had been in Kiev with an international committee. This man, they said, went home to America and wrote a series of articles and a book about the Ukraine. But the thing that amused them was that he did not know much about the Ukraine. They told us: he had rarely been out of his hotel room, he hadn't seen anything, he might as well have written his book without having left America. These Ukrainians said that this book was full of inaccuracies, and they had a letter from his chief agreeing that this was so. They were mostly worried that this man, who was known now as an authority on the Ukraine, might be believed in America. And they told with laughter how one night, near the hotel where he was eating, a car back-fired in the street and he leaped back, crying, "The Bolsheviks are shooting prisoners!" And, said the Ukrainians, he probably still believes it.

In the afternoon we walked through the beautiful park which edges the cliff above the Dnieper. There were huge trees here, and already the music sh.e.l.ls burned by the Germans had been replaced and a new stadium put up. And among the trees were the graves of the defenders of the city, green mounds with red flowers planted on the tops of them. There were little theaters, and many benches to sit on.

Far below, the river winds beside the cliff, and across the river is a sandy beach, where people lie in the sun and swim in the river. Far off there is the flat land with the ruins of the town which was completely destroyed in the fighting for the city, wreckage and blackness, and bits of standing wall. Here is the place where the Red Army came back to the city and relieved it from its German occupation.