The collaboration between these two restless and creative men, notes Robert Capa, began this way: at the beginning of a newly invented war which was named the cold war… no one knew where the battlefields were. While I was figuring what to do I met Mr. Steinbeck, who had his own problems. He was struggling with a reluctant play, and the cold war gave him the same shivers it gave me. To make it short, we became a cold-war team. It seemed to us that behind phrases like "Iron Curtain" "cold war" and "preventive war" people and thought and humor had fully disappeared. We decided to make an old-fashioned Don Quixote and Sancho Panza quest-to ride behind the "iron curtain" and pit our lances and pens against the windmills of today.

Capa's whimsical statement of purpose reveals, in fact, something about why A Russian Journal is in many ways superior to more ambitious, even more informative contemporary accounts of postwar Russia. Typical is an apologist for the Soviet experiment, Dr. Hewlett Johnson, dean of Canterbury (Soviet Russia Since the War, 1947), who intones that it is "our responsibility to understand Russia," and offers a smorgasbord of topics: "A Young Woman of Aristocratic Birth," "Soviet Women Lead the World," "Childhood in Soviet Land," "Planned Industry." Steinbeck and Capa's aim was far more modest; and, unlike Johnson, they had no political agenda.

Other less biased writers articulated intentions that often echo that of Steinbeck and Capa-to understand the people of Russia- but nets are cast far more widely.