A Russian Journal

  The Hotel Metropole was a rather grand hotel, with marble staircases and red carpets, and a great gilded elevator that ran sometimes. And there was a woman behind the desk who spoke English. We asked for our rooms, and she had never heard of us. We had no rooms.

  At that moment Alexander Kendrick of the Chicago Sun, and his wife, rescued us. Where, we asked, was Joe Newman?

  “Oh, Joe! He hasn’t been here for a week. He’s in Leningrad, at the fur auction.”

  He had not received our cable, nothing had been prepared, and we had no rooms. And it was ridiculous to try to get rooms without preparation. We had supposed that Joe would get in touch with whatever Russian agency was responsible for it. But since he hadn’t, and hadn’t received the cable, the Russians hadn’t known we were coming either. But the Kendricks took us to their room, and fed us smoked salmon and vodka, and made us welcome.

  After a while we didn’t feel lonely and lost any more. We decided to move into Joe Newman’s room to punish him. We used his towels, and his soap, and his toilet paper. We drank his whisky. We slept on his couch and his bed. We thought that was the least he could do for us, to repay us for having been miserable. The fact that he didn’t know we were coming, we argued, was no excuse for him, and he had to be punished. And so we drank his two bottles of Scotch whisky. It must be admitted that we didn’t know at that time what a crime this was. There is considerable dishonesty and chicanery among American newspapermen in Moscow, but it has never reached the level to which we brought it. A man does not drink another man’s whisky.

  CHAPTER 3

  WE DIDN’T KNOW YET what our status was. In fact, we weren’t quite sure how we had got there, who had invited us. But the American correspondents in Moscow rallied around, and helped us, and held our hands—Gilmore, and Stevens, and Kendrick, and the rest, all good and sympathetic men. They took us to dinner in a commercial restaurant at the Hotel Metropole. And we found that there are two kinds of restaurants in Moscow: the ration restaurant, where you use your ration tickets and the price is quite low; and the commercial restaurant, where the price is fantastically high for much the same food.

  The commercial restaurant in the Metropole is magnificent. A great fountain plays in the center of the room. The ceiling is about three stories high. There is a dance floor and a raised place for a band. Russian officers and their ladies, and civilians in the upper brackets of income, dance around the fountain with great decorum.

  The band, incidentally, played louder and worse American jazz music than any we had ever heard. The drummer, an obvious but distant student of Krupa, whipped himself into a furor and juggled his sticks in the air. The clarinet player had been listening to Benny Goodman records, so that here and there one could hear a faint resemblance to a Goodman trio. One of the piano players was a lover of boogie-woogie, which he played with considerable skill and great enthusiasm.

  Dinner consisted of four hundred grams of vodka, a great bowl of black caviar, cabbage soup, steak and fried potatoes, cheese, and two bottles of wine. And it cost about a hundred and ten dollars for five people, at the Embassy rate of twelve roubles to the dollar. It also took about two hours and a half to serve, a thing that startled us a little bit, but which we found was invariable in Russian restaurants. And we also found out later why it takes so long.

  Since everything in the Soviet Union, every transaction, is under the state, or under monopolies granted by the state, the bookkeeping system is enormous. Thus the waiter, when he takes an order, writes it very carefully in a book. But he doesn’t go then and request the food. He goes to the bookkeeper, who makes another entry concerning the food which has been ordered, and issues a slip which goes to the kitchen. There another entry is made, and certain food is requested. When the food is finally issued, an entry of the food issued is also made out on a slip, which is given to the waiter. But he doesn’t bring the food back to the table. He takes his slip to the bookkeeper, who makes another entry that such food as has been ordered has been issued, and gives another slip to the waiter, who then goes back to the kitchen and brings the food to the table, making a note in his book that the food which has been ordered, which has been entered, and which has been delivered, is now, finally, on the table. This bookkeeping takes considerable time. Far more time, in fact, than anything to do with the food. And it does no good to become impatient about getting your dinner, because nothing in the world can be done about it. The process is invariable.

  Meanwhile the orchestra howled out “Roll Out the Barrel” and “In the Mood,” and a tenor came to the microphone, which he did not need, for his voice was sufficient for the room, and he sang “Old Man River” and some of the Sinatra favorites, like “Old Black Magic” and “I’m in the Mood for Love,” in Russian.

  While we were waiting, the Moscow correspondents coached us on what to expect and how to conduct ourselves. And we were very fortunate that they were there to tell us. They pointed out that it would be desirable for us not to become accredited to the Foreign Office. They emphasized the rules which applied to men so accredited, the one of major importance to us being that then we could not leave the Moscow area. And we didn’t want to stay in Moscow. We wanted to go into the country and see how people on the farms lived.

  Since we had no intention of sending dispatches or entering cables which would come under the censorship bureau, we thought it might be possible to avoid this Foreign Office accreditation. But we still didn’t know who was sponsoring us. It would be either the Writer’s Union, we thought, or Voks, which is the cultural relations organization of the Soviet Union. And we liked to think of ourselves as a cultural relation. We had determined beforehand that the information we wanted was non-political, except insofar as the politics were local, and insofar as they directly affected the daily lives of people.

  The next morning we telephoned Intourist, which is the organization that takes care of foreigners. And we found that as far as Intourist was concerned, we had no status, we didn’t exist, and there were no rooms. And so we called Voks. Voks said that they knew we were coming, but they had no idea we had arrived. They would try to get us rooms. That was very difficult, because all of the hotels in Moscow are full all of the time. Then we went out and walked in the streets.

  I had been there in 1936 for a few days, and the changes since then were tremendous. In the first place the city was much cleaner than it had been. The streets were washed and paved, where they had been muddy and dirty. And the building in the eleven years was enormous. Hundreds of tall new apartment houses, new bridges over the Moscow River, the streets widened, and statues every place. Whole sections of the narrow, dirty districts of the old Moscow had disappeared, and in their place were new living quarters and new public buildings.

  Here and there there was some evidence of bomb damage, but not very much. Apparently the Germans did not get their planes over Moscow with any success. Some of the correspondents who had been there during the war told us that the anti-aircraft defense was so effective, and the fighter planes so numerous, that after a few trials with great losses the Germans more or less gave up aerial bombardment of Moscow. But a few bombs came through: one dropped on the Kremlin, and a few dropped on the outskirts. But by that time the Luftwaffe had taken its beating over London and was not willing to sacrifice the large number of planes necessary for the bombardment of a heavily protected city.

  We noticed also the work that was being done to the face of the city. There were scaffoldings against all the buildings. They were being painted, and broken places were being repaired, for within a few weeks the city would have its eight-hundredth anniversary, and this was to be celebrated with a great deal of ceremony and decoration. And a few months afterwards there was to be the thirtieth anniversary of the November Revolution.

  Electricians were stringing lights on the public buildings, and on the Kremlin, and on the bridges. And this work did not stop in the evening—it went on with floodlights all night, this painting and grooming of the city f
or its first non-war celebration in many years.

  But in spite of the bustle and preparation the people in the streets seemed tired. The women used very little or no make-up, and the clothing was adequate but not very pretty. Great numbers of the men in the streets were in uniform, but they were not in the Army. They were demobilized, and their uniforms were the only clothes they had. The uniforms were without insignia and without shoulder boards.

  Capa did not take his cameras out, for he had been told by the other correspondents that without permission in writing this is not a desirable thing to do, particularly for a foreigner. The first policeman picks you up and takes you in for questioning unless your permissions are written and in order.

  We had begun to feel lonely again. Far from being watched and shadowed and followed, we could hardly get anyone to admit that we were there at all. And we knew that bureaus would move slowly in Moscow, just as they do in Washington. Now, skulking around in other people’s rooms, surrounded by our hundreds of rolls of film and our camera equipment, we began to get worried.

  We had heard of a Russian game—we prefer to call it the Russian gambit—which has rarely been beaten. It is played very simply. The man in the government bureau you want to see is not there, is sick, is in hospital, or is away on his vacation. This can go on for years. And if you should shift your attack to another man, he also is out of town, is in hospital, or is away on his vacation. One Hungarian commission, with some kind of petition which, I imagine, was not looked on with favor, had been waiting for three months, first to see a particular man, and finally just to see anyone. But they never did. And an American professor, with an idea for exchange students, a brilliant, intelligent, and good man, had been sitting in anterooms for weeks. And he too had never seen anyone. There is no way to oppose this gambit. There is no defense against it, except to relax.

  Sitting in Joe Newman’s room, we thought that this might well happen to us. Also, from having done a bit of telephoning, we had discovered another interesting thing about Russian offices. No one gets to an office before noon, no one. The office is closed until noon. But, from noon on, the office remains open, and people work, until midnight. The mornings are not used for work. There may be bureaus which do not follow this formula, but the ones we had to deal with in the following two months all kept this kind of hours. We knew that we must become neither impatient, nor angry, since if one does one loses five points in the game. It turned out that our fears were groundless, for the next day Voks swung into action. They got us a room in the Savoy Hotel, around the corner, and they invited us over to their office to discuss our plans.

  The Savoy is a hotel which, like the Metropole, is assigned to foreigners. People living at the Metropole claim that the Savoy is the better hotel of the two, that its food and service are better. On the other hand, the people who live at the Savoy claim that the food and service at the Metropole are better. This mutually complimentary game has been going on for years.

  We were assigned a room on the second floor of the Savoy. We walked up marble stairs lined with statuary, our favorite being a bust of Graziella, a famous beauty who had come in with Napoleon. She was dressed in an Empire costume, and wore a large picture hat, and by some mistake the sculptor had chiseled her name not as Graziella, but as Craziella, and Crazy Ella she became to us. At the top of the stairway was an enormous stuffed Russian bear in the position of charge. But some timid customer had removed the claws from his front paws, so that he attacked with no fingernails. In the semi-darkness of the upper hall he was a constant source of mild shock to new customers of the Savoy.

  Our room was large. We discovered later that it was a very desirable room in the eyes of people who lived in other rooms in the Savoy. The ceiling was twenty feet high. The walls were painted a doleful dark green. And it had an annex for the beds, with a curtain that drew across. Its best features were a huge combination in black oak of couch, mirror, and double closets, and a mural which ran around the top of the wall. That mural got into our dreams as time went on. If it can be described at all, it is thus: At the bottom and center of the picture is an acrobat lying on his stomach with his legs over his back. In front of him two identical cats are gliding under his hands. Across his back lie two green alligators, and resting on top of the alligators’ heads is an insane monkey, with bat-wings, who wears an imperial crown. This monkey, who has long and sinewy arms, reaches through two portholes in his wings and grasps the horns of two goats which have the tails of fishes. Each of these goats wears a breastplate which terminates in a thorn on which there are pierced two violent-looking fishes. We didn’t understand this mural. We didn’t know what it meant, nor for what reason it was put in our hotel room. But we began to dream about it. And certainly it did have a quality of nightmare about it.

  Three huge double windows overlooked the street. As time went on, Capa posted himself in the windows more and more, photographing little incidents that happened under our windows. Across the street, on the second floor, there was a man who ran a kind of camera repair shop. He worked long hours on equipment. And we discovered late in the game that while we were photographing him, he was photographing us.

  Our bathroom, and we were the glory of Moscow for having a private one, had certain peculiarities. The entrance was difficult, for one could not open the door simply and go in, because the door was interfered with by the bathtub. One stepped inside, crouched back in the corner beside the washstand, closed the door, and then one was free to move about. The bathtub was not evenly set on its legs, so that once filled, if one moved suddenly, the whole thing swayed and water slopped out on the floor.

  It was an old bathtub, probably pre-revolutionary, and its enamel had been worn off on the bottom, leaving a surface a little like sand-paper. Capa, who is a delicate creature, found that he began to bleed after a bath, and he took to wearing shorts in the tub.

  This bathroom had a peculiarity which was true of all the bathrooms we experienced in the Soviet Union. There may be other kinds, but we did not find them. Whereas all the taps leaked—the toilet, the basin, the bathtub faucets—all the drains were completely watertight. Consequently, if you filled the basin, the water stayed there, and when you pulled the plug out of the bathtub drain, it had no effect at all in allowing the water to escape. And in one hotel in Georgia the roar of water escaping from the taps was so great that we had to close the bathroom door to get any sleep. It was from this that I made my great invention, which I offered to turn over to heavy industry. It is very simple. Reverse the process: put the taps where the drains are, and the drains where the taps are, and the whole thing would be solved.

  But our bathroom did have one very fine quality. There was always plenty of hot water in it, sometimes mostly on the floor, but it was there when we wanted it.

  It was here that I discovered an unpleasant quality in Capa’s nature, and I think it only right to set it down in case some young woman should ever listen to any suggestion of matrimony from him. He is a bathroom hog, and a very curious one. His method is as follows: He rises from his bed and disappears into the bathroom and draws a tub of water. He then lies in that tub of water and reads until he becomes sleepy, whereupon he goes to sleep. This may go on for two or three hours in the morning, and it can be readily seen that the bathroom is immobilized for any more serious purposes while he is in there. I offer this information about Capa as a public service. With two bathrooms, Capa is a charming, intelligent, good-tempered companion. With one bathroom, he is a—

  Already we had been subjected to the intricacies of Russian money. It had several values, official and non-official. The official rate was five roubles to one dollar. The American Embassy rate was twelve roubles to one dollar. But you could buy roubles on the black market for fifty roubles to one dollar, and certain South American legations bought roubles in other countries, like Poland or Czechoslovakia, for a hundred roubles to one dollar. The American Embassy, which maintained strict honesty in this matter of twelve to one, was
criticized by some of its employees for making things very expensive. For example, if a member of our Embassy gave a party, it was vastly expensive at twelve to one, while a member of one of the aforementioned embassies could give a party at a hundred to one, and the party was incredibly cheap.

  When we registered at the Savoy Hotel we were issued ration tickets, three for each day, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. By using these tickets in the ration restaurant in the hotel we could eat quite reasonably. If we wanted to eat in a commercial restaurant, the food was very expensive, and not very much better. The beer was sour, and very expensive. It averaged about a dollar and a half a bottle.

  In the afternoon Voks sent a car to take us to the main office for an interview. It was our impression that there had been some battle about who was to be responsible for us, the Writer’s Union or Voks. And Voks had lost and got us. The Voks offices are in a beautiful little palace, which was once the home of a merchant prince. We were received by Mr. Karaganov in his office, which is oak-paneled to the ceiling and has a stained-glass skylight—a very pleasant place to work. Mr. Karaganov, a young blond, careful man, who spoke a precise, slow English, sat behind his desk and asked us many questions. He doodled on a pad with a pencil, one end of which was blue and the other red. And we explained our project, which was to avoid politics, but to try to talk to and to understand Russian farmers, and working people, and market people, to see how they lived, and to try to tell our people about it, so that some kind of common understanding might be reached. He listened quietly and made angular marks with his pencil.