Cartier-Bresson was the first Western photographer to be admitted to the Soviet Union after the death of Josef Stalin, in 1953. The pictures he made in the summer of 1954 were news in themselves, and several magazines reproduced quite a few of them. When he returned to the U.S.S.R. nearly two decades later, in 1972 and 1973, his image of Soviet life developed a new dimension—grim, barren, and bleak.