"I don't know," I said.
"Your own most recent work seems to us cynical," he said.
"It is not cynical," I answered. "I believe one job of a writer is to set down his time as nearly as he can understand it. And that is what I am doing."
Then he asked questions about American writers, about Cald-Well, and Faulkner, and when would Hemingway have a new book.
And he asked what young writers were coming up, what new people. We explained that a few young writers were beginning to emerge, but that it was too soon to expect them to come out. Young men who should have been practicing their trade of writing had spent the last four years in the service. Such an experience was likely to shake them very deeply, and it might take some time for them to comb out their experience and their lives, and to settle down to writing.
He seemed a little surprised that writers in America do not get together, do not associate with one another very much. In the Soviet Union writers are very important people. Stalin has said that writers are the architects of the human soul.
We explained to him that writers in America have quite a different standing, that they are considered just below acrobats and just above seals. And in our opinion this is a very good thing. We believe that a writer, particularly a young writer, too much appreciated, is as likely to turn as heady as a motion-picture actress with good notices in the trade journals. And we believe that the rough-and-tumble critical life an American writer is subject to is very healthy for him in the long run.
It seems to us that one of the deepest divisions between the Russians and the Americans or British, is in their feeling toward their governments. The Russians are taught, and trained, and encouraged to believe that their government is good, that every part of it is good, and that their job is to carry it forward, to back it up in all ways. On the other hand, the deep emotional feeling among Americans and British is that all government is somehow dangerous, that there should be as little government as possible, that any increase in the power of government is bad, and that existing government must be watched constantly, watched and criticized to keep it sharp and on its toes. And later, on the farms, when we sat at table with farming men, and they asked how our government operated, we would try to explain that such was our fear of power invested in one man, or in one group of men, that our government was made up of a series of checks and balances, designed to keep power from falling into any one person's hands. We tried to explain that the people who made our government, and those who continue it, are so in fear of power that they would willingly cut off a good leader rather than permit a precedent of leadership. I do not think we were thoroughly understood in this, since the training of the people of the Soviet Union is that the leader is good and the leadership is good. There is no successful argument here, it is just the failure of two systems to communicate one with the other.
Mr. Karaganov's pad was covered with red and blue symbols. He said finally, "If you will write down a list of things you want to do and see, and send it through to me, I will see whether it can be arranged."
We liked Karaganov very much. He was a man who spoke straight and unconfusedly. Later we were to hear many flowery speeches and many generalities. But this we never heard from Karaganov. We never pretended to him that we were anything but what we were. We had a certain outlook, an American viewpoint, and possibly to him certain prejudices. Far from disliking us, or distrusting us because of this, he seemed to trust us more. During our stay in the Soviet Union he was of great help to us. We saw him a number of times, and his one request of us was, "Just tell the truth, just tell what you see. Don't change it, put it down as it is, and we will be very glad. For we distrust flattery." He seemed to us an honest and a good man.
The silent fight was still going on concerning our trip. At the present time one can go to the Soviet Union only as a guest of some organization, or to do some particular job. We were not sure whether the Writers' Union or Voks was sponsoring us, and we were not sure that they knew either. It may be that each was trying to move this dubious honor on to the other. One thing we were sure of, we did not want to become accredited as regular correspondents, with correspondents' credentials, for in that case we should have been under the sponsorship and control of the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office rules are very strict regarding correspondents, and if we once became their babies, we could not have left Moscow without special permission, which is rarely granted. We could not have traveled with any freedom, and our material would have been subject to Foreign Office censorship. These things we did not want, for we had already talked to the American and British correspondents in Moscow, and we had found that their reporting activities were more or less limited to the translation of Russian daily papers and magazines, and the transmission of their translations, and even then censorship quite often cut large pieces out of their cables. And some of the censorship was completely ridiculous. Once, one American correspondent, in describing the city of Moscow, said that the Kremlin is triangular in shape. He found this piece of information cut out of his copy. Indeed, there were no censorship rules on which one could depend, but the older correspondents, the ones who had been in Moscow a long time, knew approximately what they could and could not get through. That eternal battle between correspondents and censor goes on.
There is a famous story of a new ground mole, and it goes like this: A civil engineer invented a ditch-digging, or tunnel-digging, machine called a ground mole. Pictures of it and specifications appeared in a Soviet scientific magazine. This was picked up by an American magazine and was printed. A British newspaper, seeing the article, wired its correspondent in Moscow to get a story on the ground mole. Whereupon the British correspondent went to the Soviet scientific journal, dug out the material, and sent it to its paper, only to find the whole story killed by censorship. This happened a number of months ago, and, as far as I know, the story is still held up in censorship.
The correspondents were further inhibited by a fairly new decree, which makes the divulgence of agricultural, industrial, or population figures equally treasonable with the divulgence of military information. The result is that one can get no figures at all concerning any Russian production. Everything is dealt with in percentages. Without a base figure, this leaves you about where you started. For example, you cannot be told how many units are turned out by a certain tractor factory, but you can be told that it is, say, ninety-five per cent of the 1939 level. If you know how many units were turned out in 1939, your figure is likely to be accurate, but if you have no other figure you are lost. In some cases this whole thing is ridiculous. If, for example, one asks what the present population of Stalingrad is, one would be told that it is eighty-seven per cent of the pre-war figure. The process then is to look up the population pre-war and compute the number of people now living in Stalingrad.
A constant double talk warfare goes on between the Moscow correspondents and the censorship office, and we did not want to become involved in it.
At this point Joe Newman returned from his junket to the fur auctions in Leningrad. In addition to being a good friend, Joe is a very effective man. He was trained in Japan and in Argentina, and this training makes him particularly fit for the Moscow scene. He has an easy quality from long experience in countries where directness is highly uncommon; he has grown sensitive to nuances and to suggestions. He can read the meaning behind meanings, and besides this he is a relaxed man. You have to be in this job, or you very soon go crazy. We are greatly indebted to him for the information and training he gave us.
We called at the American Embassy, and it is different from any I have ever seen. Whereas in most embassies the line of American tourists and visitors is interminable, at the Moscow Embassy practically no one calls. There is no one to call. There are no tourists. Very few Americans go to Moscow. And while we have a fairly large staff in Moscow, they are limited more or less to associating with one another and with members of other embassies. For the association of foreigners with Russians is rather limited. There is no question, in this period of tension, that Russians do not like to be seen with members of the American Embassy, and this is fairly understandable. One member of our Embassy explained it to me in this way. He said that he had been speaking with a State Department man who had come to Moscow and who complained that he was not able to get in touch with Russian people. The Embassy man said, "Well, let's suppose that in Washington you heard that one of your secretaries was going out with somebody from the Russian Embassy. What would you do?" And the State Department man replied, "Why, I'd fire her, immediately." And the Embassy man said, "Well, you see, maybe the Russians feel the same way."