A Russian Journal
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A Russian Journal
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Narrated by:
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Richard Poe
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Written by:
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John Steinbeck
About this listen
Steinbeck and Capa's account of their journey through Cold War Russia is a classic piece of reportage and travel writing.
Just after the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare opportunity took the famous travelers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad - now Volgograd - but through the countryside of the Ukraine and the Caucasus. Hailed by the New York Times as "superb" when it first appeared in 1948, A Russian Journal is the distillation of their journey and remains a remarkable memoir and unique historical document.
What they saw and movingly recorded in words and on film was what Steinbeck called "the great other side there... the private life of the Russian people." Unlike other Western reporting about Russia at the time, A Russian Journal is free of ideological obsessions. Rather, Steinbeck and Capa recorded the grim realities of factory workers, government clerks, and peasants, as they emerged from the rubble of World War II - represented here in Capa's stirring photographs alongside Steinbeck's masterful prose.
Through it all, we are given intimate glimpses of two artists at the height of their powers, answering their need to document human struggle. This edition features an introduction by Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw. ©1948 John Steinbeck (P)2014 Penguin Audio
What listeners say about A Russian Journal
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Paulina Zelitsky
- 2020-12-11
Nothing was true and everything possible
In my opinion, the title "A Russian Journal" is misleading. It should have been called "A Journal of Potemkin Village". A good example of how even a brilliant writer like Steinbeck could have been converted by Stalin into ‘the useful idiot’. As it happens, I was born in Ukraine in 1945 where my mother died from starvation in July of 1947. More than 1 million people died from starvation in Ukraine during 1945-47after the second war victory by the Soviets. Stalin ordered to remove all harvest in Ukraine during that period to export it to the European countries because he needed the hard currency to purchase the western technology. This forced starvation was called "Holodomor 3". Steinbeck traveled to Ukraine in August of 1947 where he was feasted on food and entertainment to a degree that he thought he would blow up from overeating. If he intended to write the truth, he shouldn’t have trusted ‘the Potemkin Village’ prepared by the tyrant in power for propaganda. Steinbeck preferred not to notice, like many other western leftist writers and artists, that all of his trips and meetings in the USSR were organized and monitored by KGB. NYT also didn't understand that, and the left wishful thinking obtained priority over the truth.
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