“A Russian journal” by John Steinbeck and Robert Capa: “us” and “them” in photographs

DOI:

Цитирование. Давыдова О. С. «Русский дневник» Джона Стейнбека и Роберта Капы: «свои» и «чужие» в фотографиях // Вестник Волгоградского государственного университета. Серия 4, История. Регионоведе-ние. Международные отношения. – 2024. – Т. 29, № 1. – С. 34–43. – (На англ. яз.). – DOI: jvolsu4.2024.1.4

Introduction. “A Russian Journal,” which became the result of John Steinbeck and Robert Capa’s trip to the USSR in August– September 1947, has been the subject of much research by historians, literary critics, and political scientists. The main issues discussed in relation to “A Russian Journal” are generally understandable: this is Steinbeck’s claim to objectivity (it is rare that an article about this travelogue does without a quote in which Steinbeck declares his desire to “write it as it happened, day by day, experience by experience, and sight by sight, without departmentalizing” [14, p. 40]; this is the image of the USSR as the “other”, created by two Americans [9]; and these are studies related to the discourse of control constructed in the process of creating “A Russian Journal” [16]. However, most of these studies focus on the figure of John Steinbeck and his text; photographs by Robert Capa appear in the articles solely as illustrations of Steinbeck’s notes. An exception is, for example, the work of Katherine Reischl, “Photographic Literacy: Cameras in the Hands of Russian Authors”: its author is interested in the interaction of two media within the framework of one work, the intersection between the optical and verbal modes of creating an image of the “other” [10].

Given Steinbeck’s interest in the story of the journey rather than the news that informs the logic of reporting, it is worth noting that the narrative of “A Russian Journal” unfolds simultaneously in two media environments. Modern narratology recognizes that the specificity of the media environment “imposes conditions on what kind of stories can be transmitted” [12]. From this perspective, the photographs of Robert Capa, incorporated into Steinbeck’s text, obviously require attention not only from the semiotic perspective (as signifiers of the text), but also within the framework of their own mediumspecificity. Such an interdisciplinary approach makes it possible to take a different look at the famous “Russian Journal” and describe the formation of images of “us” and “others” based on the role, functions, and specifics of photographs and not only of text. Since these pictures do not exist separately from the words that accompany them, achieving this goal is possible only within the framework of the interdisciplinary approach described above. The meaning of Capa’s photographs requires contextualization, both within the framework of Steinbeck’s text and within the framework of a conversation about the specifics of photography as a special way of representation. Accordingly, within the framework of the study, it is necessary to describe the functions of the photographs within the structure of “A Russian Journal,” analyze their visual specificity, as well as their connection with the text, and, based on the work done, draw conclusions about where and how “A Russian Journal” as an integral media text draws the boundary between “us” and “them”. In order not to confuse the reader in terms, the literary part of the “Journal” will be referred to as “text”, the visual part as “photo”, and all together will be called “media text”.

Methods and materials. As mentioned in the introduction, the purpose of the article largely dictates research optics. Since the main material of the study is, in fact, “A Russian Journal” itself as an integral media text, for its examination, we propose to use the method of discourse analysis.

As part of this work, we will need the following methodological steps: to restore the theoretical understanding of photography as a special way of representation in the first post-war decades; and to describe the mechanics of the narrative in light of its existence in visual and verbal media environments. An analysis of narrative implies that we take into account not only the very story told by John Steinbeck and shown by Robert Capa but mostly its structure based on the interaction of two media. Thus, we are interested in what is embedded in the narrative and what is implied by the way the book is structured.

This will enable us to offer the reader a methodological frame, with the help of which, in the next section, the analysis of Robert Capa’s photographs on the pages of “A Russian Journal” will be carried out.

The photograph itself hardly has any clear meaning; the latter is formed either at the level of connotations [1] or through montage with other images (as in the case of a photo series or photo essay); or, as the theoretician Vilém Flusser argues, a photograph acquires meaning at the moment when it enters the distribution channel, and it will depend on this very distribution channel. For example, “the photograph of the moon landing... with each switch-over to another channel, takes on a new significance: The scientific significance crosses over into the political, the political into the commercial, the commercial into the artistic” [4, p. 62]. Flusser’s indication is fundamentally important for us: the meaning of Capa’s photographs is given and supported by the text, but at the same time, the text also uses these photographs as its support. In order to answer the question of the discursive function of the photographs in “A Russian Journal,” it is worth first understanding the mode of photographic representation that is characteristic of the mid-twentieth century in general and of Robert Capa in particular.

Undoubtedly, a trail of authenticity stretches behind the photographic image from the moment of its very appearance. With the development of technology, the increasing clarity of the picture, the reduction of exposure time, and the advent of circulation printing, the photograph is assigned the function of documenting the event, which inevitably entails a connotation of truthfulness. Meanwhile, despite the seemingly obvious ability of a photograph to convey reality as it is, photography is far from being objective; rather, it is about the fact that with the development of this technology, a specific discourse is born – the discourse of the photographic. French photography theorist André Rouillé traces the evolution of this discourse from document to art. “The photographic image... is the production of a new (photographic) reality in the course of a process that combines the registration and transformation of something really given... When photography registers, it always transforms, builds, and creates” [11, pp. 86-87]. Hiding its own madeness (cropping, blurring of the focus, working with long-range and near-ground shots, highlighting elements through compositional choices), photography takes the place of a document confirming and certifying reality. The photographic image seems to be comprehensible to anyone; its language is universal and does not require translation; pictures can show us worlds that are distant or completely inaccessible to the human eye. Thus, photography becomes the guarantor of the coherence of the world, infinitely expanding and eluding human perception with the development of industrial society [11, p. 93]. This complex of ideas accompanying the evolution of photographic practices, the reception of the photographic image, and the understanding of the cultural and historical function of photography accumulates in the conceptual bundle “photography and truth”, which underlies the functioning of reportage photography in the 20th century up to the Vietnam War. This is how the thesis of photographic truth appears, which, as André Rouillé aptly notes, “is... only the result of a belief that, at a certain moment in the history of the world and images, takes root in practices and forms supported by certain equipment” [11, p. 94].

Just a few months before the departure of Steinbeck and Capa to the USSR, on April 27, 1947, Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson established “Magnum” photo agency. The activity of Capa and Cartier-Bresson both within “Magnum” and before it (Capa entered the history of photography as a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker) demonstrates a certain understanding of photography as a document that crystallized in the first post-war decades. This period becomes the heyday of the photographic document and, at the same time, a harbinger of its crisis and subsequent decline. Combining the appearance of the “Magnum” photo agency with the publication of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s program text, “The Decisive Moment”, in 1952, André Rouillé says that these two events mark the rise of information photography. Photography is considered “a factor of industrial and scientific progress, as a primary tool for information, and moreover, as a guarantor of truth, as a means of mastering the world. There is a world, albeit infinite, but quite real, accessible, cognizable and controlled by modern means, primarily photography” [11, p. 166].

Cartier-Bresson’s “The Decisive Moment” does indeed mark a shift in understanding the connection between photography and reality, photographer and camera, and a photograph and truth. The main metaphor for photographer in Cartier-Bresson’s text is referee [2, p. 28]. The importance of the referee metaphor lies not only in its externality to events but also in its position of power and control: it is the referee who makes the decisions. The world that a photographer equipped with a camera looks at is chaotic and disordered, but the photographer has the ability to see order in this world and fix this order. In this position of Cartier-Bresson, all those lines of tension that have conditioned the development of photo reportage merge together: the fact that the photograph has been taken and its aesthetic characteristics turn out not to contradict objectivity; on the contrary, they are derived from reality. The logic of informing here completely merges with the logic of the document and the idea of “truth”: the very gesture of pointing the lens at reality becomes a fixation of the world as it is. But, as we remember from the beginning of this section, all this is just discourse.

So, in the text of “A Russian Journal,” the visual media environment coexists with the verbal environment. Accordingly, before proceeding to the analysis of images and the mechanisms that are used to create images of “one’s own” and “them”, it is worth determining the relationships that these two environments enter into, providing a common field for a single narrative. This connection, as researchers show, is much broader than the simple contextualization of an image or an illustration of a text, and it does not come down to understanding the text as provoking mental images or the image as a signifier in relation to the signified of the word [8]. In particular, Philippe Ortel notes that by the 1880s, literature, fascinated by the interest in mental processes, approaches the photographic way of interacting with reality; the camera becomes something like a “universal interpreter for describing man and his abilities” [3]. Photography morphs into a theoretical paradigm [7], a kind of cognitive optics that shapes both how we look at the world and how we talk about it, what we see in it, and how we interpret it. “Seeing things ‘photographically’ would mean identifying in the outside world configurations close to this device, nature not devoid of black boxes (caves and undergrowth, buildings), reflectors (lakes, floors, walls), and footprints (fingerprints, etc.)” [3]. If we also consider Capa’s photographs as a photographic dimension of Steinbeck’s text, Rouillet’s reflections on the nature of photo reportage and documentary photography will apply both to the photographs and to the media text of “A Russian Journal” as a whole.

The photographs of Robert Capa in the “Journal” represent one of the levels of representation equal to the text. Their existence makes the text more “photographic”, that is, included in the photographic discourse, which implies the paradigm of a photograph-document and the morality of reporting. It is in this optics that the reader is invited to consider the mechanisms of the formation of the image of “us” and “them” on the pages of “A Russian Journal.”

Analysis. In the “Journal,” the story of the beginning of the journey is described with a share of humor and irony, but the most important thing for us here is the following: this trip was not custom-made; it was the result of a very sincere – in any case, it is hard not to believe Steinbeck in his aspirations – desire of Steinbeck to find out what kind of people these Russians are, and not just to understand, but also “to make an honest report”. They came up with this idea sitting in a New York hotel bar in March 1947: “...and it occurred to us that there were some things that nobody wrote about Russia, and they were the things that interested us most of all... We would avoid politics and the larger issues. We would stay away from the Kremlin, from military men and from military plans. We wanted to get to the Russian people if we could” [14, pp. 34-35]. In August, the writer and the photographer began their journey.

Steinbeck immediately declares that politics was not part of his or Capa’s mission. It is difficult to imagine that, though. The text of “A Russian Journal” is inevitably political, if only because it constantly works with ideological maxims and cultural stereotypes that are obviously the product of symbolic politics.

Moreover, the visit of two Americans to the USSR in 1947 is, of course, a political event. As the researchers point out, the trip to the USSR was not something exotic for Capa: he worked with Ilya Ehrenburg during the Spanish Civil War [10, p. 193]; for ten years he applied, waited, and reapplied for a visa to the Soviet Union, and was finally able to obtain it as a companion of Steinbeck [5, p. 57].

Responsibility and control over the presence of Americans in the USSR were entrusted to the American department of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS). The VOKS materials devoted to the visit of Steinbeck and Capa have been published [16], as well as the impressions of the direct participants in this process from the Soviet side: memoirs of the head of the American department of the VOKS, Ilia Khmarskii [6]; an interview with the deputy chairman of the VOKS, Aleksandr Karaganov; and an interview with the junior staffer of the American department, Svetlana Litvinova (in the “Journal,” she is usually mentioned as Sweet Lana) [15]. Analyzing these materials, Liia Zhdanova concludes: “Steinbeck, who insistently wanted to see the essence of the Russian people in ordinary people ‘Ukrainian collective farmers (who were prepared in advance for the meeting with the Americans through the efforts of the VOKS staff) or a Georgian chauffeur (who was in fact an employee of the state security service)’ in most cases dealt with a skillfully staged illusion” [16, p. 11]. The study of these documents “gives a more complete picture of... what meaning – for both the American and the Soviet side – was carried by the setting in which Steinbeck and Capa met with the Soviet people, and, finally, thanks to and in spite of what the idea of Steinbeck’s “Russian Journal” took on its final form” [16, p. 11].

For us, the question of the authenticity or illusory nature of the image is not fundamental. It does not matter whether the collective farmers were indeed happy and the tables were bursting with abundance; our aim is to focus on the discursive mechanisms through which the “Journal,” as an integral media text, presents its reader with images of “us” and “them”. At first, it is therefore worth understanding not so much the images themselves but rather how photography is perceived in the context of “A Russian Journal” and what discourse it produces.

“A Russian Journal” declares its own non-politicality to be extremely political. Actually, this duality is, in many respects, the determining factor of this media text. On the one hand, Steinbeck offers the reader the position of a naive observer, honest and interested in the unbiased reality of onlookers. This position is furthered by his comic digressions about Capa, who is constantly worried about the tape [14, p. 118], takes a bath for an hour [14, pp. 125-126], or irretrievably borrows books from American correspondents living in Moscow [14, p. 126]. The same position is promoted by emotional inserts that offer us a human author, a subject with a body and emotions – suffering from stuffy airports, tired of overeating at Ukrainian feasts, or sweltering in the Batumi sun. Both Steinbeck and Capa appear on the pages of the “Journal” as characters with striking psychological traits. From this point of view, their main message, which now and then manifests itself in the text, is the thesis of equality: the inhabitants of the USSR are the same people as we are. They also eat, dress, and struggle with external circumstances such as bureaucracy or domestic troubles. It should also be noted that Steinbeck and Capa themselves almost never appear in photographs on the pages of “A Russian Journal.”

The implicit thesis of equality is largely a response to the stereotypes already formed by the symbolic and ideological politics of the Cold War. Steinbeck details how they were all scared before leaving: “They’ll just take you into a black prison and they’ll torture you. They’ll twist your arms and they’ll starve you until you’re ready to say anything they want you to say” [14, p. 38]. It is in response to these fears that the journey is undertaken. From such a position, “us” and “them” are more likely to be separated along the vertical of power.

Throughout the text, Steinbeck repeatedly emphasizes and separates himself, Capa, the inhabitants of the USSR on the one hand, and politicians and those in power on the other hand. “Any leader on any side who seriously proposed war should be hunted down as an insane criminal and taken out of circulation. Capa has seen a great deal of war, and I have seen a little, and both of us feel very strongly on the subject” [14, p. 273].

The best way to support the thesis of equality is through the photographs taken on the collective farm named after Shevchenko and in Georgia. In these photographs, we see people smiling and laughing while they gather crops [14, pp. 132-133], dancing barefoot in the farm club [14, p. 157], and sitting at the table in their best clothes [14, p. 139]. They are people living in peace and harmony with nature: the boy in a handmade grass hat [14, p. 131] and the beekeeper appearing on the background of a tree branch [14, p. 134]. Their work is not separate from their lives, and this is where their strengths belong. It is here that we see the manifestation of the potential of the moral photo essay, as Cartier-Bresson described, and the logic of the “decisive moment” comes into play. Not only do these photographs illustrate Steinbeck’s words, but they also verify them. By their appearance on the pages of the book, these pictures turn the text of a subjective observer into a statement of truth.

Note, incidentally, that initially Steinbeck’s travel notes (there were eighteen of them) were published from January 14 to 31, 1948, in the New York Herald Tribune, which sponsored Steinbeck and Capa’s trip to the USSR [5, p. 50]. When Steinbeck’s notes were published in book form by Viking Press in April of that year, “many critics seem to find Capa’s photographs the more attractive element of the book, displeasing the author and resulting in a temporary cooling of the friendship between the two men” [13, pp. 96-97]. Despite this remark, it is worth noting that the photographs of Capa in “A Russian Journal” do not look like a uniform array. Most often, researchers separate the Moscow series from the series filmed on the Ukrainian collective farm and in Georgia; works from Stalingrad stand apart. It is quite expected that Capa’s photographs are most often considered in the context of Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” ideas and within the framework of the standards of the Magnum agency: “By the standards set by his Magnum generation for capturing the

‘decisive moment,’ Capa’s Moscow portfolio failed. The pictures were boring... The inner life of Moscow, as far as it existed, was barred to him....In the outer republics, Capa’s pictures... took on renewed life as well....His work regained the vitality and life so missing from his Moscow portfolio” [5, pp. 57-59].

Thus, on the one hand, photographs by Robert Capa, especially those from Ukraine and Georgia, work to support the thesis that the inhabitants of the USSR are the same people as everywhere else; on the other hand, Steinbeck still does not deny himself the opportunity to draw a waterline between the USSR and the USA – let us say, horizontally – and determine to treat the inhabitants of the USSR, albeit as equals but still different.

If reflections on the similarity of Soviet people to people in general fit into the mainstream of Steinbeck’s general humanistic ideas, then the theses on otherness and differences are the place where his critical position is manifested. This position is not so much towards the USSR as towards modern reality as a whole. Steinbeck himself says this in his “Journal”: “...in the Soviet Union the writer’s job is to encourage, to celebrate, to explain, and in every way to carry forward the Soviet system. Whereas in America, and in England, a good writer is the watch-dog of society” [14, p. 240].

Recovering the story of Steinbeck’s journey, Zachary Jonathan Jacobson notes: “And underlying his search for the ‘truth’ about Russia was a quest to escape the inauthenticity of his own land. ‘Depressed’, Steinbeck recoiled at the ideologies fed to him by a modernized society” [5, p. 53].

Of course, in Steinbeck’s remarks, one can see both implicit value judgments and emotional coloring, but Steinbeck hardly thinks of the inhabitants of the USSR as enemies; the Soviet people in the “Journal” are not “strangers,” but precisely “them,” “others.” For example, the writer emphasizes a different attitude towards power: “The Russians are taught, and trained, and encouraged to believe that their government is good....The deep emotional feeling among Americans and British is that all government is somehow dangerous... that existing government must be... watched and criticized to keep it sharp and on its toes” [14, p. 67].

Steinbeck is also impressed by the difference in the perception of elements of everyday culture: “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” [14, p. 75]. In these fragments, he himself becomes an excellent mouthpiece for the same stereotypes that he initially sought to debunk.

Photography also works with this “otherness”. In this context, the camera on the pages of “A Russian Journal” becomes both a metaphor and a marker of a barrier, a border that is difficult to cross. This complexity is connected with the specificity of the photographic media, with its ability to be an instance of sight and control – and therefore to possess power and therefore the ability to generate fear. The idea of the power of the gaze is expressed almost directly in the text: “Nothing in the Soviet Union goes on outside the vision of the plaster, bronze, painted, or embroidered eye of Stalin” [14, p. 98]. So, how does this (seemingly unconscious, but rather belonging to the discursive field) metaphor of the photographic eye unfold? How does photography relate to the creation of an image of the “other”?

To begin with, they did not want to let Capa into the USSR, citing the presence of their own photographers in the Soviet Union as the reason. “The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled, for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph” [14, p. 36]. This fear of the American photographer marks, among other things, the increased importance of visual media and an intuitive understanding of the possibility of looking at “us” and “them”. The fear of a “foreign” photographer is a fear of other people’s eyes, which will take ideologically “unfavorable” pictures not at all because they “smuggle” unnecessary connotations into them, but they will “see” reality differently and capture this very vision. This position directly reproduces the theses of Rouillé, who constantly reminded us that photography never captures the world “as it is,” but creates its own interpretation. This “foreigner gaze” is actually manifested in one of the first pictures appearing in the book: the view of a

Moscow street taken definitely from a window, as if on the sly [14, p. 60].

At the same time, the very presence of Capa with a camera turns out to be impossible in a number of places. In particular, in Georgia he is not allowed to film hydroelectric power plants; upon arrival in Moscow, he has to wait a long time for permission to go outside with his camera, and then twice in different districts of Moscow to explain to the police why he can shoot there. Finally, the censors confiscated some of the tapes from Capa. “They had removed films that showed too much topography, and the telephoto picture of the mad girl of Stalingrad was gone, and the pictures which showed prisoners” [14, p. 313]. Of course, “A Russian Journal” immediately indicates that the Cold War is primarily an ideological war fought in the media field. That is why the appearance of Steinbeck and Capa as characters (living people) should reduce the intensity of the ideological struggle. However, despite their intention to understand how people actually live in the USSR, the “Journal” as a media text still implicitly contains a number of key symbolic markers of the Cold War. These are, in particular, differences in cultural policy, different value systems, and different attitudes towards power, which are expressed in the text. Strangeness gradually replaced otherness and became potentially dangerous just in connection with the presence of the photographer, provoking fears of stranger invasion. The desire to hide the true reality from the guests [16, p. 10], described in the memoirs of the VOKS representatives, also marks the distinction between Soviet and American citizens as “us” and “them”.

Now that we have considered the photographic discourse, it is worth turning to the images themselves and their aesthetic qualities in order to answer the question of how the images fit into the mechanics of creating images of “us” and “them” in terms of content. Although Capa’s photographs can hardly be described as uniform or stylistically similar, there are several crosscutting themes, motifs, and characteristic aesthetic solutions in this body of work. Without claiming to be complete, we note only those of them that are related to the construction of the image of “us” and “them” through photography. The first such motif is time: the connection between the present, the past, and the future.

In the media text of “A Russian Journal,” the past of the USSR is the war. The future is the restoration and normalization of life. The present is what provides the connection between the two layers. For example, there is a photograph from a Ukrainian collective farm, which was later included in the famous exhibition “The Family of Man” (Museum of Modern Art, USA, 1955, curator Edward Steichen). In the picture, a man and a woman are putting up rafters for the roof of a village house; the photo was taken on the collective farm Shevchenko-1 [14, p. 142]. Katherine Reischl, who devoted a monograph to the interaction of photography and words in the texts of Soviet authors (Steinbeck’s “A Russian Journal” for her creates an important historical perspective as a text about the Soviet Union using photography), shows how the meaning of a picture depends on the context. Within Steichen’s exhibition, it might symbolize prosperity. However, Steinbeck’s text sets a slightly different context, reminding the reader that the modernity of Ukrainian peasants is evidence and a consequence of the devastation of the war. “The theme of rebuilding, replanting, and survival constantly reminds the reader of the war. The inclusion of these photographs in Steichen’s architectural vision for “The Family of Man”, however, turns them into just another part of his utopian building project – one making them part of Steichen’s own idea for the photographic narrative” [10, p. 197].

The picture included in “The Family of Man” is accompanied by the following: “And he pointed to the two who were struggling with the heavy beams to build a roof, and he said, ‘This winter those two will have a house for the first time since 1941. They must have peace, they want their house. They have three small children who have never had a house to live in. There cannot be in the world anyone so wicked as to want to put them back in holes under the ground. But that is where they have been living’ ” [14, p. 144]. The construction turns into fragility, prosperity takes on a shade of temporality, the shadow of the past marks the future, and the rafters directed to the sky seem to remind of the skeletons of ruined houses. Capa’s photographs constantly capture this tension of memory from the first postwar years. For example, a picture from Stalingrad shows the city square with a non-working fountain.

In the center of it, there is a sculptural group of children circling in a round dance. The white sculpture contrasts with the dilapidated houses, darkened by shells, with black empty windows, making it appear even whiter [14, p. 1 86]. The war becomes one of the points of building an identity – at least in the form in which this identity is seen and restored by the authors of “A Russian Journal.” A man in Stalingrad shows a family album to his children: he is taken in profile, looks at the photographs with a smile, the boy looks into the album with interest, and the girl listens to her father. “It was the whole history of his life, and all the good things that had happened to him. He had lost everything else in the war” [14, p. 208].

Another striking feature is the absence of names for the heroes of Capa’s shots, even those taken close-up. The reader becomes aware, for example, of the name of the boy in the grass hat on the Shevchenko collective farm, but the collective farmer, the man with the family album, and the married couple lifting the rafters remain nameless. In addition to the fact that Capa and Steinbeck almost never mention the names of their heroes, the photographer rarely refers to eminent people. Almost the only “status” person on the pages of “A Russian Journal” is Colonel Denchenko, who tells the Americans about the siege of Stalingrad. The heroes of the rest of the pictures have no surnames and often no names, and the captions mark them as part of the landscape, as “typical.” Country and personality here seem to merge together. On the one hand, Capa’s reporting strategy points to a rejection of the photojournalism customary for the 1930s and 1940s, which relied on fixing priority events and authoritative characters. On the other hand, there is hardly any real turn to subjectivity here; these characters are not individualized but serve as markers of general trends.

As we remember, the inclusion of a static image in a text enables it to acquire the qualities of a temporal object – not only to fix the moment but also to demonstrate the potential for unfolding into the past and future. In addition to the frequent combination of time layers of the past and the future in the foreground and background (as in the photographs from Stalingrad), Capa’s photographs have a narrative due to the relationship between the characters and the landscape. Actually, this is the notorious image of the country that the authors of the “Journal” set out to create.

Results. The article has shown that in the context of distinguishing between “us” and “them,” “A Russian Journal” as an integral media text functions on several discursive levels. The specificity of the photographic medium, perceived as “truthful,” but in fact not so, supports Steinbeck’s explicit intention to be an honest and unbiased travelogue writer. The fusion of the figure of an impartial observer of reality and the photographer-author, who has power over a chaotic world, creates the conditions for indistinguishability between how photography actually works and how it is perceived (photographic discourse). Thus, Capa’s photographs in “A Russian Journal” function in two ways, and the division into “us” and “them” can be seen on two levels. Capa’s reportage photographs support Steinbeck’s intention to maintain impartiality and verify his impression of the USSR, not so much by their aesthetic qualities as by the very fact of their own photographic quality.

The humanistic idea of equality between peoples is explicitly expressed through the positions “we are the people” and “they are the rulers.” However, both Steinbeck and Capa implicitly maintain a distance in their photographs in relation to their heroes, at times marking points of misunderstanding and reproducing the very stereotypes that they themselves wanted to debunk. This also implies the existence of a strong authorial position, which can be eliminated neither from the text nor from the photographs. Moreover, the appearance of a photographer, camera, or film on the pages of the “Journal” is often associated with fears of the gaze of a stranger, which makes it possible to speak of a periodic shift of markers of otherness towards markers of alienation.

Explicitly in “A Russian Journal,” there are images of “others,” but implicitly, these are images of “strangers” that demonstrate the potential for future confrontation. The content of the images of otherness becomes the very elements that already play a key role in the formation of stereotypes about the early period of the Cold War. These stereotypes are based on differences in the positions of representatives of the cultural industries, the codes of everyday and popular culture, and various economic policies. The identity of the Soviet person is constructed in the photographs of the Journal through the work of Capa with the temporal dimension of the photographic image. The starting point in the past was the war, and the past inevitably shaded and marked utopian construction projects (whether it be a house for a family or a building site in the truest sense of the word). Working with closeups turns people more into symbolic markers than into personalities. Thus, the integral image of the “other” country is formed, and sometimes this country may seem dangerous even if this is not explicitly stated.

The research carried out within the interdisciplinary approach shows that to understand the Cold War and its mechanisms, one needs to address not only the meaning of imagery but also the discourse ruling the ways this imagery is produced, understood, and distributed. Of course, this research needs some extension. For instance, it is crucial to analyze readers’ reactions to the “Journal” in both the USA and USSR and to consider critical evaluations of the work in the mass media.

“A Russian Journal” can be included alongside other similar pieces created during both official and unofficial visits of American journalists, writers, and photographers to the USSR. Such examples include, to name a few, “The People of Moscow seen by Henri Cartier-Bresson,” published in 1955, or “Journey across Russia: the Soviet Union today,” by Bart McDowell and Dean Conger, issued in 1977.

NOTE

• ¹    This work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation under Grant № 22-18-00305, https:// rscf.ru/en/project/22-18-00305/, “The images of enemy in Cold War popular culture: their content, contemporary reception and usage in Russian and U.S. symbolic politics”, Herzen University.

Исследование выполнено за счет гранта Российского научного фонда № 22-18-00305, , «Образы врага в массовой культуре Холодной войны: содержание, современная рецепция и использование в символической политике России и США», РГПУ им. А.И. Герцена.