'Our Man in Moscow'
Petrovich, Michael B.
'Our Man in Moscow' Moscow JOURNAL, THE END OF STALIN, by Harrison E. Salisbury. University of Chicago Press. 450 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Michael B. Petrovich ALL I KNOW," Will Rogers quipped,...
...All in all, I am glad Salisbury was our man in Moscow...
...The book is full of dispatches which had been "killed" by the Moscow censors...
...During most of these five years the entire American press corps in the U.S.S.R...
...They must have felt like the spectators of the proverbial dog fight under a blanket...
...Those readers who tend to suppose that the life of a foreign correspondent in Moscow is a glamorous one will learn that it is not all a bowl of caviar...
...And almost periodically throughout the book Salisbury includes another in a series of notes to the Soviet director in charge of foreign correspondents: "Precisely one year ago," one of them begins, "I wrote you requesting a three- or fourroom apartment...
...Moscow Journal is a day-by-day account of the life of New York Times correspondent Harrison E. Salisbury during his Moscow assignment from March, 1949, to October, 1953, the last half-decade of Stalin's dictatorship...
...Especially interesting is his description of the situation at the time of Stalin's death and Beria's unsuccessful bid for power...
...Consequently the quality and quantity of American reporting from the Soviet Union are matters of vital importance...
...This American Middle Westerner came to know the Russians and their language well...
...There is the loneliness of the American in a mid-Victorian Moscow hotel, far from his family in Minneapolis, and a leper in Soviet society by virtue of being a Western newsman...
...Salisbury was so upset by such letters that he begged his editor to preface every dispatch with a warning to the reader that this was all the Soviet censor would allow to go through...
...Yet the authors of much of that news have been limited to a half-dozen American journalists who must operate in a closed Soviet system which is opposed to freedom of the press...
...There are the exasperating restrictions on travel...
...He even lived part of the time in a Russian village where he had a cottage and garden...
...This book is no sensational expose of the "secrets of the Kremlin...
...Yet this does not mean that Salisbury was unable to learn a great deal on his own...
...There are the outrageously incompetent telephone and telegraph operators who have no respect for time, even when a cable is marked urgent and paid for at the double rate...
...Reviewed by Michael B. Petrovich ALL I KNOW," Will Rogers quipped, "is what I read in the papers...
...This statement pretty much describes general American knowledge of Soviet affairs...
...There is much to learn from these sober and chastening remarks...
...His journal records the conversation of tired women queued up before shops, the rapture of an Orthodox Easter service, the primeval rhythms of rural Russia, the chicanery of bureaucrats, a funeral, a day in the park, the circus, the drabness under leaden skies, Ivan Ivanovich's hopes for peace and a better life...
...Indeed, it leads one to think—going back to Will Rogers' remark—that most of what even the enterprising, intelligent American reporter in the Soviet Union knows is what he gleans from the Soviet press...
...These ought to squelch thoughtless charges in various letters to the editor of the Times that their Moscow correspondent was "soft on the Russians...
...I have not yet received that apartment...
...Yet, as they all discovered, it is not only devilishly hard to get at the real news in the Soviet Union...
...The best part of Salisbury's book is not the news reports which never made the pages of the New York Times, but rather his penetrating and deeply human observations on life in the Soviet Union...
...There are the problems of mere housekeeping, of getting a cook (restaurant meals are too expensive), a secretary (to double as an interpreter), a chauffeur (because you can't get a Soviet driver's license...
...It evokes the significant events of some of the most crucial days of the cold war in the light of Soviet internal affairs—the hate-America campaign, the wave of anti-Semitism, the "Doctors' Plot," Stalin's death, Beria's downfall, and the struggle which eventually ousted Malenkov and brought Khrushchev to power...
...There is the dead hand of the censor, always ready to blank out almost any news that goes beyond the dreary official handouts...
...consisted of five men—Eddy Gilmore and Tom Whitney of Associated Press, Henry Shapiro of United Press, Andrew Steiger of Reuters, and Salisbury...
...I also want to cite Salisbury's thoughtful observations on life in the United States as seen from the perspective of an American in Moscow...
...it is even harder to get it out of the Soviet Union and to the home office, because of censorship and a hundred other frustrations...
Vol. 25 • December 1961 • No. 12
