Edward Crankshaw, in Russia and the Russians (1948), sought "to produce a picture of the Russian people, their culture, and their political ideas, against the background of the unchanging conditions of their landscape and their climate." Descriptions of the great Russian plain and detailed synopses of Russian history absorb many pages of his tome, but the "living image of a distant people" emerges only as a series of statistics: twenty-five years ago, he reminds his readers, four-fifths of the Russian population was composed of peasants, while in 1948 only half are peasants. In Just tell the truth: The Uncensored Story of How the Common People Live Behind the Russian Iron Curtain (1947), journalist and president of the American Agricultural Editors Association John L. Strohn had a similarly ambitious agenda: "To see and talk with people of the Soviet Union, so I can introduce them through stories and broadcasts to the people of America… What I'm interested in are the common people." Visiting collective farms, he observes the damage caused by war, the absent men, and concludes-as does Steinbeck-that "it is the women who are the real heroes of the farm front-women who did practically all of the farm work during the war, who are doing even now 80 per cent of the work on collective farms today."

But the Russian women of Steinbeck and Capa, not absorbed in statistics and generalizations, strike more convincing poses: the village wit at the first communal farm who shakes a cucumber at Capa's camera. Or Mamuchka, renowned cook, owner of a new cow, Lubka, who hasn't the personality of her beloved former cow, Katushka. Capa's photos, like Steinbeck's prose, avoid the panoramic in favor of the portrait. Their joint commitment to record only what they could witness-based not on research or speculation but on visual record-is their full story. Paradoxically, their approach-to frame only what is seen-more accurately re-flects Stalin's Soviet Union, where visitors saw only scenes carefully orchestrated by Soviet officials. Journalists traced the same path Steinbeck and Capa did, the so-called Vodka Circuit, because Westerners were typically taken to Moscow, Kiev, and Tiflis, showplace cities all.