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The Imperiia Project: a spatial history of the Russian Empire

Salisbury in the bunker

My first encounter with the name Harrison Salisbury came during my second year at Amherst College. I had a job working for the library, and because I could read Russian, I was assigned to work out at "the bunker" - the offsite repository. The bunker was built under Bare Mountain in 1957 as a Strategic Air Command center: officers from Westover Air Force Base were meant to shelter there in case of nuclear attack.

My job was to help catalog the papers of the famous Cold War journalist. I spent countless hours crouching over boxes, tucked in among the metal shelves of the repository. There I was, aware both that I was handling material of historical significance and that my job was do to nothing more than skim its surface - do just enough to make it discoverable to others.

It was a strangely pleasing task performed in a pleasingly lonely location. Under the mountain.

This page is referenced by:

The "last, best" guidebook When journalist Harrison Salisbury first visited the Soviet Union in 1944, he tucked a copy of what he called “the last, best” guidebook into his gas mask bag. It (the book, not the gas mask) had been published, for the first time in English, in 1914 in Leipzig by the famous Baedeker publishing house. /tweet-end
30 years and dozens of visits later, Salisbury still described the volume as “more accurate, more complete and more revealing than any” description of Russia published since. /tweet-end