Revisiting John Steinbeck’s A Russian Journal from 1948
By
Clara Weiss
21 March 2017
The current preparations of the imperialist powers for war against Russia are accompanied by a hysterical campaign in the media and many blatant historical falsifications, which even dominated the recent 75th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, a critical event in the most savage war in human history.
In this climate, it is worth revisiting A Russian Journal by the remarkable American novelist John Steinbeck from 1948. Together with famed Hungarian-born war photographer Robert Capa (born Endre Friedman), Steinbeck visited the Soviet Union in 1947 at the very outset of the Cold War.
While the Soviet Union was destroyed more than 25 years ago by the Stalinist bureaucracy, the experiences of the Second World War continue to shape the consciousness of millions in the former USSR. Despite certain limitations, this work by Steinbeck and Capa provides valuable insight into the historical experiences of the working class and peasantry of the former USSR.
Steinbeck and Capa made their decisions to go to the Soviet Union amid warnings about “dangerous Russians” and the advice of an American businessman to launch a nuclear bomb against the “red bastards.” Merely two years had passed since the US government dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, and the specter of yet another world war which would now be fought with nuclear weapons was quite real. The declared goal of Steinbeck and Capa was to see for themselves and document how the “simple people” in the USSR were living.
The population in the USSR had just undergone a war of unspeakable barbarism prosecuted by Nazi Germany, in which 27 million Soviet citizens…