Wikipedia: A Russian Journal, published by John Steinbeck in 1948, is an eyewitness account of his travels through the Soviet Union during the early years of the Cold War era. Accompanied by the distinguished war photographer Robert Capa, Steinbeck set out to record the real attitudes and modes of existence of people living under Soviet rule. Being journalists, they were suspicious of the aggressive propaganda employed by their own American media and by the gradually increasing atmosphere of paranoia towards Russia, which portrayed the Communist peoples as robotic, fanatical and militaristic, (i.e. the "Communist Hordes").
This literary and photographic record of life under Stalin's rule is a valuable historical document. Steinbeck and Capa describe Russians living in extremely different conditions than those in the reports disseminated by the Western powers of the day: life in the cities and the country appears peaceful and very similar to that of other peoples in Europe at the time. Without diminishing the totalitarian nature of Stalin's regime, Steinbeck discovered that the main fear held by average Russians was not of Stalin but another World War.