The Siege of Leningrad Narrated to Western Audiences: Harrison Salisbury and his Hidden Sources

Polina Barskova will discuss her research in Harrison Salisbury's collection at Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library. An inquisitive and popular American journalist, Harrison Salisbury spent nearly twenty years with the United Press (UP), much of it overseas, and was UP’s foreign editor during the last two years of World War II. Between 1949 and 1954, Salisbury served as the Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times. This presentation will address Salisbury's book The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (NY, 1969) which remains until today, in spite of its many mistakes and omissions, one of the richest accounts of the intellectual, cultural, and emotional life in the city of disaster. Based on archival research in Salisbury's papers, Polina Barskova will discuss the American journalist's use of historical sources for his book on the siege of Leningrad, beyond those published by the Soviet authorities, as well as the ways in which Salisbury looked for information that allowed him to (re)construct a rich and controversial tapestry of the historical drama despite strict Soviet political censorship. Among other aspects of Salisbury's work, the presentation will explore Salisbury’s productive exchanges with contemporary Russian authors writing about the siege of Leningrad, whose accounts the American journalist creatively incorporated in The 900 Days, challenging our traditional understanding of Western accounts of Soviet history before the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Polina Barskova is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California—Berkeley, a celebrated Russian poet and prose writer, and a literary translator. She is the author of the scholarly monograph, Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (2016) and editor of several volumes of critical essays and poetic anthologies, in Russian and English, devoted to the cultural history of besieged Leningrad.