A Russian journal

What Hacker News says

1. wrpSep 2022
   John Steinbeck, in his travel book, A Russian Journal (1948) has a great quote about the perception of cameras among people who have been through war:

   There was some reluctance about letting a cameraman into the Soviet Union, and none about letting me in, and this seemed strange to us, for censorship can control film, but it cannot control the mind of an observer. Here we must explain something that we found to be true during our whole trip. The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled, for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument, and a man with a camera is suspected and watched wherever he goes. And if you do not believe this, try to take your Brownie-No. 4 anywhere near Oak Ridge, or the Panama Canal, or near any one of a hundred of our experimental areas. In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so.

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2. wrpJan 2023
   Steinbeck was the first serious novelist I got into as a kid, even read his collected letters, so I have a soft spot for him. It really shook my perception of his "journalistic" approach when I learned that Travels with Charley was almost entirely made up. Makes me wonder how much literary license he used in other books like A Russian Journal.
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3. nlJan 2023
   It's not unlikely that Stalin would personally have been involved.

   Steinbeck traveled to the USSR just prior 1948, writing A Russian Journal[1] which portrayed the Soviet Union in a moderately positive light. Given Steinbeck's fame and the extremely limited amount of travel US Citizens did the US at this time it's likely Stalin knew about it, and was aware of the showing of the film.

   If you are looking for a document that says "Stalin ordered X" it's very unlikely it ever existed. That's not how dictatorships worked - instead someone in his circle would have quietly ordered it to stop being shown.

   [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Russian_Journal

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4. nlJan 2023
   Running for weeks is a very short run! Something happened!

   And Steinbeck was famous in Russia for releasing his fairly positive "A Russian Journal" around the same time.

   It's impossible to know who exactly ordered it, but it is likely Stalin was aware of it being shown.

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5. corodraOct 2019
   You're not aware of how communist regimes form. They're actually really smart in this regard.

   You kill everyone that doesn't agree with you, along with their family. That's anyone who didn't fight with you either. Let along just against. The 20-45 million that died from famine is in addition to a rough estimate of 30 million killed during and shortly after the revolution. You see the same in Russia too. Oh and in Cambodia. They all actually focused on the "intelligentsia" community first. Cambodia just decided to wipe them all out. Russia and China were big on making double sure they were with the party (not just neutral), before they passed up on killing them. The book 1984 really wasn't accidental in that regard. The more you could think for yourself, the more dangerous you were to the party.

   It's not an accident that people are scared to criticize these governments. That's where John Steinbeck really fucked up in his book the Russian Journal. Saying "Oh, do you know anyone that's disappeared because of the soviet regime". If you don't know any Russians (at the time)... I mean, duh, you're probably not going to. But talk to even one dissident against the soviet regime in any of the eastern bloc, they'll give you a list of names of who they personally know.

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