A Note on Steinbeck's 1963 Visit the Soviet Union

Elaine and John Steinbeck at the border of the American zone in Berlin during their Journey to Russia.

In September 1963 my wife, our then three children, and I began our second year in the American embassy at Moscow. Our first year there had been less than inspiring. The atmosphere of the Soviet police state was more depressing than I had anticipated; we had gone through the Cuban missile crisis several weeks after we arrived; and I had a humdrum administrative job, supervising the motor pool, ordering supplies, and trying to keep the heating and plumbing working in our shoddy building. Fortunately, after a year I was reassigned to the embassy's political section.

Now I was one of three officers following Soviet internal affairs. My job was to report to Washington on developments in the Soviet intelligentsia and in regime controls over intellectual and spiritual life; on strains between the Russians and other Soviet nationalities; on what was happening in religion; and, in general, on dissidence. It was not an easy job, but in my first year I had met a number of artists and writers who were willing to have contact with Americans. More than once I surprised an old hack by telling him I had read in graduate school one of his Stalinist novels. My wife, Mary Jane, and I also met a few writers who wrote as honestly as they could and still be published, such as Vasily Aksyonov, the most popular younger Soviet writer ²; Raisa Orlova, a critic of American writing; and Orlova's husband Lev Kopelev, who was a specialist in German literature. Not after my arrival in Moscow in 1962 had come the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's semi-fictional account of the Gulag, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I learned only after leaving Moscow that it had been Kopelev, a fellow prisoner of Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag, who first pushed for its publication.³

One day the embassy received a telegram from the State Department in Washington, instructing us to inform the Soviet authorities that John Steinbeck and Edward Albee would like spend a month in the USSR for purposes of cultural exchange. Steinbeck and his wife, Elaine, would arrive first, Albee later, but they would have considerable overlap. Albee, we heard, was coming along at the suggestion of Steinbeck, who at 61 claimed not to know as much as he should about the writings of younger Americans and so wanted his friend Edward to join him.

Steinbeck asked that the embassy assign officers who knew Russian and the Soviet literary scene to accompany him and Albee. The embassy designated me to travel with Steinbeck; colleague Bill Luers would accompany Albee.⁴

I did not look forward to the assignment with great pleasure. As I knew, and as Raisa Orlova had reconfirmed to me, Steinbeck was viewed in the Soviet Union as a "progressive" American writer. After all, I thought, the hero of In Dubious Battle had been a Communist. I found in the embassy library a copy of A Russian Journal, published in 1948 with text by Steinbeck and photos Robert Capa, which I saw as a whitewash of the Stalinist USSR. Once again, it seemed, the Soviets would have a Steinbeck visit use to their advantage.

Not so, as I realized after Mary Jane and I had met John and Elaine at Sheremetevo airport in October 1963 and spent an evening with them. Whatever Steinbeck's politics had been earlier decades, he was in no way deceived about the present regime in Moscow. He had (as I read much later) indeed been used on 1948 visit, and he did not want this to happen now—which was why he wanted someone from the embassy to accompany him. The Soviets, I knew, had hoped to find in Steinbeck an American who opposed our growing involvement in Vietnam; but my wife and I found as we talked with the Steinbecks that evening that strongly supported the Kennedy administration on Vietnam.

The...