A Russian Journal

In 1947, John Steinbeck and photographer Robert Capa entered the Soviet Union on assignment for the New York Herald Tribune. They travelled through Moscow, the ruined city of Stalingrad, collective farms and towns in Ukraine, and the Georgian Caucasus, seeking to record ordinary life rather than produce another abstract argument about the developing Cold War.

Steinbeck’s observations and Capa’s photographs document postwar reconstruction, food shortages, agricultural work, official ceremonies, private hospitality and the limits placed on foreign visitors. The book remains both a travel memoir and a historical record of people rebuilding homes and livelihoods under Stalin’s government after the devastation of the Second World War.