Shooting the War

“And why shouldn’t I go out in this costume?” I asked.
“Because you will be so stared at,” said Elisaveta.
“I’ve been stared at in so many countries,” I replied, “that I might as well add one more to the list.”
However, a natural reluctance to be stared at by a whole stadium caused me to abandon my more convenient slacks for a skirt, on the day that I went out to photograph a football game; but my camera attracted an amount of attention that proved painful to me, nevertheless.
On a Sunday shortly before the war, when the Dynamo team played the Red Army, I took my place with the Soviet press photographers. It was with some pride that I brought out my new Speed Graphic, which had been built especially for me by the Folmer Graflex Company in Rochester. It has range and distance finders for five interchangeable lenses, and when a 30-cm. telephoto lens is used, on a 3%/ x 41/4 film, it is an excellent camera for sports. At least the Rochester technicians and I thought so. But the Soviet photographers all use the Russian Leica. It is made in one of their new factories, and while the lenses are ununiform, the camera itself is fairly well constructed, and the Russians are exceedingly proud of it. Any camera larger than the palm of your hand is something they think an antique. “Why does she use such an old-fashioned camera?” I could hear them say about my beautiful treasure, so newly designed that there was only one in existence.
No photographer likes to look old-fashioned in front of one hundred thousand people. I could not stand up and make a speech to the stands, explaining that in America practically all pressmen use Speed Graphics, and most of them a size larger than mine. It was even worse when, after I had photographed a few touchdowns, I turned my camera on the crowds, who interested me more than the game itself. Their incredulity—that the American photo-correspondent should turn her back on the game—was audible.
I shall probably never be able to redeem my reputation with the football fans, who perhaps think that in the United States we are still using wet plates; but I am happy that before I left the country I was able to vindicate my cameras before the Russian photographers. After watching on repeated occasions, with some amazement, what a peanut flash bulb could do, they requested me to show my equipment before a mass meeting of photographers, and they left in ecstasies over what were, to them, entirely new developments in camera construction and flash synchronization.
But some of the elements of our culture which they chose to borrow surprised me exceedingly, principally the cocktail. Its evolution, by the time it reaches Gorky Street, is something to astonish anyone who had been inadequately trained on Fifty-second Street. The new palatial Koktail Hall serves a Kowboy Koktail which would frighten into a stampede the cowboys after whom it is named. Several layers of brightly colored liqueurs, combined with gin and topped with brandy, are separated by the yolk of an egg into something that looks like a rainbow parfait and tastes like everything behind the counter.
I suggested to Erskine that maybe they were trying to symbolize the dawn of civilization, with a rising sun and everything, but he was busy murmuring under his breath, “Which came first, the cowboy or the . . . ?”
The Kowboy Koktail has a little cousin, The Beacon, also designed like a prism: a layer of chartreuse below the egg yolk and an inch of brandy above. These masterpieces are swallowed in one gulp (it was one gulp or not at all, I discovered) by actresses, literati, and Red Army soldiers on leave, to the tune of four rubles and ten kopecks a cocktail, or ninety cents. But these evidences of foreign culture are discarded by most Russians for vodka, which tastes like kerosene until you get used to it but usually turns out to be the best idea after all.
During those prewar weeks, whether we were attending a writers’ banquet with Petrov, or whether I was photographing schools and factories with members of the staff of VOKS, or whether I was just walking along the streets or sitting in a little restaurant with Elisaveta, I noticed that the jokes people told were beginning to take on a political significance. I have often thought that one can tell more about what the people are thinking by the anecdotes that they tell than any other way. Many of these stories were aimed at Hitler.
In one of their favorite anecdotes, Hitler goes to the edge of the English Channel and stands there looking longingly across the water. He decides that the problem is too much for him and summons the
oldest rabbi in the countryside, who, he believes, can give him expert advice.
Hitler explains his problem, and the rabbi says, “Oh, that’s not so difficult. Moses had the same problem three thousand years ago.” “What did Moses do?” asks the Riltrer.
“Oh, he solved it very simply,” answers the rabbi. “All he did was to pick up a certain stick, strike the waters, and everything was handled.”
“That’s just what I wanted to know,” exclaims Hitler. “Where is that stick?”
And the rabbi replies, “It’s in the British Museum.”
Another indication of the drift of international relations was a new rule that was passed, forbidding foreigners, even diplomats, from traveling outside Moscow without a government permit. This meant that even members of the diplomatic corps could not travel down to the Black Sea for a vacation without a special permit, which- was not often granted. This annoyed the diplomatic colony at first, but soon they guessed that it was a measure aimed at the Germans, to keep them from seeing too much.
However, it was essential for us to break through this regulation if we were going to do our work properly, and with the help of the Writers’ Union and VOKS, which felt it was all to the good to permit us to do a thorough reporting job of their country, in words and pictures, we were given permission to travel. Early in June we left for an extended trip through the wheat fields of the Ukraine, factories in Kharkov, Rostov, the Donbas Coal Region, the Caucasus, and the Black Sea. It seemed advisable to have Russian traveling companions, as our limited knowledge of the Russian language was hardly adequate for such a trip, and we asked Petrov and Elisaveta to come along. We were delighted when they were able to arrange to come with us.
A crowd of Soviet writers saw us off at the station with baskets of wine, vodka, chocolates, and packages of fresh caviar to eat on the train.
As the train pulled out of the station, Elisaveta took me aside. There were two compartments, and she felt a conference was in order.
“How shall we divide up?” she asked. “We two girls together, or what?”
“What is your preference?” I inquired.
“Preference doesn’t enter into it,” she said, using the phrase I had heard before in the Soviet Union. “An interpreter is a sexless person.”
“In that case, I have a preference,” I said. “I’d like to stay with my husband.”
And so it was arranged.

IN THE middle of the Red Square, on the first day of June, hailstones pelted down on me while I attempted to take pictures. All through the month of May it had been snowing fitfully. Never in the memory of the oldest peasant, everybody was saying, had there been such a spring in Moscow. I was shivering and coughing in the heaviest coat I had, which I wore with equal impartiality at chilly breakfasts in our room or outside in the Red Square. It was the same red coat which had been frowned on during air raids over China, but here, at least, it was the right color.
We had been in Moscow for a month. On our arrival we had been greeted cordially by the Union of Soviet Writers, some of whose members had helped select and translate Caldwell stories for the U.S.S.R. and were eager to welcome the author in person. VOKS, the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, which knew my Russian photographs from my three earlier visits, had obtained permission for me to take pictures again. There were many restrictions, but still I was happy that I could work.
The occasional limitations on subjects that I wished to photograph troubled me much less than the weather. It was the kind of weather that drives photographers alternately to ecstasy and madness. Piles of dazzling clouds let through the sunlight in short quick stabs, and before one could so much as whip out a yellow filter the skies became overcast and gray.
Not only did the weather delay my photographs; it retarded the crops as well. This did not worry the Russians as much as might have been supposed. War fears were growing. There was an ominous feeling that harvesttime might bring fighting with it; and when the unnaturally cold weather delayed the harvest of spring wheat for several weeks, everyone began repeating the favorite Soviet quip—that the Bolsheviks had learned to control even the weather.
While it was evident that uneasiness was growing, no one was discussing openly from which direction the war clouds were expected to gather. The nonaggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union was in effect; Germans were to be seen in all the leading hotels; the Soviet press, which is government controlled, contained not an anti-German word.
Still, I was interested to observe that if the man in the street opened his morning Pravda or Izvestia and read that a British ship had been sunk, he felt very bad about it, almost as though one of his own ships had been sunk. And if, on another day, he read that British pilots had downed an unusually large number of German planes, he was apt to tap his neighbor on the arm and show him the good news.
It made me feel that the Russian people recognized the pact as a marriage of convenience, designed to give their new industries more time to turn out needed munitions while their country remained at peace. In recent history, as short a time ago as 1918, the Germans had invaded the Ukraine, only to be driven out by the Russians, and the people had not forgotten. In the thirteenth century, the Huns had invaded the Ukraine and were driven out by angry peasant hordes led by the great Russian hero, Alexander Nevsky. And the people of Moscow had this invasion clearly in mind, too, because a vivid moving picture about it had been released in 1939. It had played to packed audiences throughout the city until the very day when the German-Soviet pact was signed, at which time it was withdrawn so suddenly that some of the movie audiences were left in darkened suspense as the Huns and the Ukrainians, clashing at saber points, faded from the screen. They were not even given the “Continued Next Week” slide, which American movie theaters run as the thriller breaks off at its most exciting point. If some omniscient theater manager could have run such a sign, it would have read, “To Be Continued After Two Years.” Its director, Sergei Eisenstein, ho-lever, had a bit of that kind of foresight. When we arrived in Moscow, he got the reels out of a safe where they were stowed away and gave Erskine and me a private showing.
“We think,” he commented sagely, “that it will not be much longer before Alexander Net,sky will be shown in public cinema theaters again.”
Although technically, in early June, 1941, Germany was the friend of Soviet Russia, there were other rumblings. The most significant, to us, was a report that came to our ears about an address that Stalin had made to the graduating class of the Military Academy. Stalin’s speech had already been printed in the Soviet papers, but we learned through one of the underground routes by which news sometimes reaches journalists that the printed version was merely the preamble to his fateful address. The main theme of his talk to the Red Army graduates had been: “Germany is our real enemy.”
This was so sensational that some of the foreign correspondents who heard it tried to cable it out; but such a statement, not even published within the borders of the Soviet Union, could not be expected to pass the censors. One foreign correspondent who smuggled the story abroad was deported within a week.
The American Ambassador, Laurence A. Steinhardt, had been preparing for weeks for the emergency he thought was impending. A second embassy was being established in the country about thirty miles north of Moscow in a dacha, or country house. He was importing tents from the United States and preparing to set them up under the birch trees to house needy Americans who might be blasted out of their hotels if action started.
He did not know until it was too late to change that the spot selected for this safe retreat was close to a group of munitions factories. More dogfights were to be held over those tents than if they had been pitched in the middle of the Red Square.
Mrs. Steinhardt was very busy making the dacha homey and comfortable. She was choosing harmonizing wall colors and fabrics and was hanging curtains in attractive color tones and heavy enough to be drawn for blackout purposes. A perfectionist down to the last pleated valance, she had curtains matched for fringes and chenille edgings by the courier who carried the pouch to Stockholm each week, as the Swedish capital afforded a wider selection of drapery trimmings than-could be found in Moscow.
Ambassadors’ wives were faced with extraordinarily complex problems in the social field during those last confusing weeks that the German-Soviet pact was in force. Protocol was assuming such proportions that it could be tackled only by supertechnicians. Within diplomatic circles each dinner called for divisions for which Solomon would have needed an advisory committee. How many Axis or Allied plenipotentiaries could be mixed, if any, and in proportion to how many neutrals?
Many embassy hostesses expanded their operating budgets by giving all entertainments in twos. But even when this was done, which of the neutrals could be trusted to speak to which of the belligerents? Some brave ambassadresses flung everyone together and continued to smile glassily while the room coagulated into sections, with floating icebergs, unseen but plainly felt, bobbing in between. One of the Scandinavian ministers evolved a superb handling of the situation. He gave a reception in which two great rooms judiciously divided up the Axis and Allied guests. These salons were not adjoining, but were connected by a short hall through which the waiters and the more fancy-free of the neutrals circulated impartially.
Lady Cripps flew into Moscow from Stockholm in the same plane which carried the wife of the French Minister, who had been her intimate friend for many years.
“It was too dreadful,” she told me. “We were the only two women on the plane and we felt so silly, not even being able to look toward each other. When the plane stopped at Riga, I found I didn’t have enough Russian currency in my purse to phone my husband. There was no way to change it at the airport, and when I saw my dear friend go to the telephone and ring her consulate in Moscow, it would have been so convenient if I could have asked her simply to tell them to call up the British Embassy and let Sir Stafford know when I was coming.”
The diplomatic colony was buzzing with a story which had recently leaked out, concerning the departure of Molotov earlier in the year for his visit to Berlin. The pro-Ally members of the diplomatic colony had been lucky in getting a long laugh at the German Ambassador, and long after the event the laugh was still good.
The station authorities had been notified, when it was time for Mr.Molotov to leave on a special train with the German Ambassador, that no one without the proper credentials would be allowed to pass the train gates. This was a routine rule in such a case. The Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs had already gone on board when the German Ambassador reached the train gate, closely followed by an attendant carrying his bags. There were, of course, credentials for His Excellency Count Friedrich von der Schulenburg, but no one had thought to make out a pass for the attendant.
The fidelity with which Soviet citizens obey orders is one of their most admirable and, sometimes, most exasperating characteristics. His Excellency, of course, wanted his bags. Courteous regrets were expressed, but certainly the station guards could not be expected to break a ruling, particularly when such important personages were involved!
Hastily, because the train was due to pull out any moment, the German Ambassador decided to make the best of it and carry his bags himself. But how could this be permitted? No papers had been issued authorizing these articles to be carried within the gates.
Zero hour arrived, and Count von der Schulenburg, complaining in two expressive languages that he would not even have a clean shirt in which to disembark at Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof, sprinted for the train and jumped on it as it moved out.
Hurrying through the moving train, he at last found Molotov in an observation car, beginning to worry about the nonappearance of the Ambassador. As soon as the Commissar understood the difficulty he issued an order. Immediately, not only the diplomatic train, but all trains coming in or out of the station on near-by tracks were stopped, and in twelve minutes a trouble engine had brought up the German Ambassador’s luggage.
During these last weeks of Russo-German peace, Erskine and I were living in a plain but comfortable room on the top floor of the old National Hotel. It was much like any European hotel room, but the service was greatly improved over Moscow hotel service as I remembered it nine and ten years ago. The bathroom plumbing worked, which it had not always done during the Five-Year Plan, and I was pleased to see small cakes of soap supplied daily with the fresh linen, for soap had been an almost unobtainable luxury in earlier years. At that time such efforts were being made to bring machinery from abroad that consumers’ goods were forced to sink to a low ebb.
Our windows looked over Gorky Street, which is the Fifth Avenue of Moscow. It was a very different-looking Gorky Street from the narrow alley which I remembered from ten years ago. Whole rows of buildings had been pushed back on rollers to make an extremely wide thoroughfare, and modern office buildings and new shop fronts gave the effect of a complete face-lifting program.
From our windows we could see the names of a block of shops; there was a Cheese Shop, a Champagne Store, a Children’s Store, with toys and frocks and suits designed for little boys and girls. Next to it was a new shop of which Muscovites were very proud. It was the Ice-Cream Parlor. We found that Eskimo Pies, which the Russians liked particularly because they considered them a symbol of Western culture, could be purchased there. But the store to which we paid the most frequent visits was the Dietetics Shop. Just inside the entrance was a door leading to the office of a doctor, who could be consulted free of charge by ailing customers who wished advice on diet. In the intervening years between the comparative famine of my last visits and the comparative plenty of this one, the Russians had discovered the vitamin and pursued it with unbridled enthusiasm.
While we were happily free from those ailments which made shopping at the Dietetics Shop necessary, it was interesting to see the array on sale. There were partially cooked meats and specially blended salads, prepared for people with specific diseases. There were thirty-two kinds of breads with various ingredients omitted or included for sufferers from ulcers, diabetes, and other illnesses. Then, there was one invalid product which we used to buy. We had discovered that an ordinary chocolate bar, at our disadvantageous rate of exchange, cost us the equivalent of $2.50; but in the Dietetics Shop, where prices were kept low for the benefit of’ invalids, their specially prepared excellent chocolate cost only thirty-five cents. So we became steady purchasers of diabetics’ chocolate.
During our early weeks in Moscow we had many visitors and we made many Russian friends. We were singularly fortunate in the kinds of contacts we had with the Russian people because it is not easy, as
a rule, for foreigners to mix with Russians. The changes in ideology—for example, like that which was then going on in regard to the Germans—were too unpredictable to the average Russian for him to want to take a chance on being seen too much in the company of foreigners. But our work, my photographs and my husband’s writing, gave us a kind of immunity which was one of our greatest assets in learning to know the country.
The people we saw most often were members of the Writers’ Union. The assistant to the editor of the foreign-literature department, young Elisaveta, who spoke almost perfect English, became one of the best friends I have had in any country. She was small and fragile-looking, with blue eyes and a cloud of black hair which she held back from her pale, sensitive face by a narrow ribbon tied Alice-in-Wonderland style. She had a warm curiosity about everything American and an almost fanatic patriotism about everything Russian. She went with me frequently while I took photographs, to act as interpreter. Each photographic expedition became at the same time a Russian lesson, for I was trying hard to increase my Russian vocabulary. I could understand short phrases, but I wanted to learn to follow longer conversations.
Erskine was busy collecting material for the book he planned to write and he often was accompanied by the young editor, Eugene Petrov, whom I had met six years before in New York City. Petrov and his collaborator Ilf, joint authors of a humorous book about the Soviet Union called The Little Golden Call, had visited America in 1935. They had driven about the United States in a Ford car, studying what to them was a strange and mysterious land, and returned to Moscow to write a book which they entitled Little Golden America. This book became one of the greatest best sellers the Soviet Union has ever known. From Siberia to Samarkand, Soviet citizens by the hundreds of thousands alternately marveled and split their sides with laughter over the humorous adventures of Ilf and Petrov among those quixotic and delightful Americans. Since the book was written, Ilf has died, and Petrov, as stern and grave in appearance as are most humorists, is now editor of the weekly picture magazine, Ogonyok.
Interest in American magazines, whenever the Russians could get their hands on them, was tremendous. One day when I was unpacking ome delicate pieces of camera equipment, Elisaveta came in and carefully smoothed out the sheets of old magazines that I had wrapped them in. When she saw that they were pages I had torn from Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, she exclaimed: “We must carry these to the House of Fashion Models.”
She took me to visit the House of Fashion Models, on Gorky Street, and we found a fashion show in process of preparation. The chief designer received my old magazine pages eagerly. “We are improving on the American models to suit the needs of Soviet women,” she explained. They were also adapting native peasant dress for city wardrobes. This latter effort I found the more commendable of the two, for with the coming of modern clothes, peasant handiwork is too easily lost.
A “bathing costume,” as the institute’s staff called it, was being prepared for the style show. This was a more radical innovation than the “costume” itself might seem to indicate, for it marked a new interest in mixed bathing. Russians have always been enthusiastic swimmers and have carried on the sport in a monastic segregation of the sexes, in a universal costume which has needed no designing from the House of Fashion Models. However, I could not imagine the weather ever getting %varm enough for bathing with or without costumes.
No slacks were designed for the fashion show, a surprising thing in a nation of women workers. The first day I put on mine, for I always wear them if I am planning to do any particularly strenuous work with a camera, Elisaveta exclaimed: “Are you going out in that costume?”