As biographer Richard Whelan notes, Capa's political philosophy, similar to Steinbeck's own, was formed when Capa was a rebellious teen: "democratic, egalitarian, pacifistic, semi-collectivist, pro-labor, anti-authoritarian, and anti-fascist, with a strong emphasis on the dignity of man and the rights of the individual." Forced to leave Budapest in 1931, he had been in exile most of his life, wandering the world as witness to the ravages of war, sometimes shooting photos for Time, Life, and Fortune, always focusing on the human drama, the ordinary in the extraordinary. Capa photographed people, not events, aiming his camera, notes Whelan, on the "edge of things… studies of people under extreme stress."

The two artists' forty-day trip to the Soviet Union in 1947 was, like Steinbeck's 1940 trip to the Sea of Cortez with Edward Ricketts, an expedition of the curious. Like Ricketts and Steinbeck on the earlier journey, Capa and Steinbeck also "wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality." If the structure of Sea of Cortez melds two approaches, the "conventionally scientific" and the experiential, this travel narrative opts for the single lens: "We would try to do honest reporting, to set down what we saw and heard without editorial comment, without drawing conclusions about things we didn't know sufficiently." Theirs was a journal, a photo essay. The structure they chose for their book-indeed, the dominant metaphor of A Russian Journal-is the Soviet Union as a framed portrait.

I

With the onset of the 1940s, the world had altered its step. "Things are very bad in the world, aren't they," Steinbeck wrote to his editor Pascal Covici in 1940. "Everything seems to be going to pot, everything as conceived before I mean.