Remembering the past, predicting the future: John Steinbeck’s explorations of Cold War Russia in A Russian Journal
Remembering the past, predicting the future: John Steinbeck’s explorations of Cold War Russia in A Russian Journal

Summary/Abstract: A Russian Journal, published in 1948, is an unusual record of the great other side of Russia, wherein American Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck and the distinguished photojournalist Robert Capa struggle to present the Soviet Union in cultural rather than political terms. The authors make a sweeping journey through the USSR, portraying the landscapes and ways of life of ordinary Russians who were emerging from the rubble of WWII with the hope of peaceful coexistence of capitalism and communism in the atomic decade. Reporting on the unknown, Steinbeck and Capa take up a delicate task of introducing simple and unexplored truths about America‘s wartime ally and its immediate postwar adversary. Consequently, A Russian Journal becomes a unique journalistic account of two countries trapped in the rigidities of the Cold War miscommunication patterns.

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