Shooting The Russian War, by Margaret Bourke-White

Shooting The Russian War, by Margaret Bourke-White
Simon and Schuster, 1942
287 pages plus photos, glossary, Appendix (types of cameras)
Library: 940.53 B774

Description
Spurred by a premonition of history about to be made, and armed with 600 pounds of photographic equipment, Margaret Bourke-White, one of America's leading photographers, arrived in Moscow in May, 1941.

When the Germans attacked, two months later, the Soviet government issued a proclamation that anyone found with a camera would be shot on sight. After a two week siege of officialdom, Margaret Bourke-White was awarded a photographer's "passport" -the only one given to a non-Russian, and from then on the shutters of her five cameras clicked unceasingly. Her book, illustrated with almost a hundred of her best shots, records the ordeal of the Russian people as seen through the eyes and expert camera lens of an adventurous and charming young American woman.

During the fiercest bombings of Moscow she hid under her bed until the air-raid wardens passed, and then went out on the balcony of her hotel room and and photographed the incredible fireworks that made the skies over the Kremlin look like a Hollywood dream of Fourth of July. On her trip to the front, over muddy roads the consistency of Camembert cheese, she was bombed in broad daylight. Later, when one of the enemy planes was downed, Margaret Bourke-White photographed and spoke with the Germans who had bombed her.

But this book is not all grim war. Its main concern is the temper of the Russian people: the earnest lady firemen "liquidating" incendiary bombs; Russia's favorite movie actress in her country house; high-school girls pelting an operatic tenor with flowers-like ant American fanclub; the Patriarch of the Old Orthodox Church describing over the tea table his greatest adventure-a trip to Brooklyn in 1894.

It is an account of a strange country where escalators move with terrifying speed, where elevators only go up; where the citizens are amaze to hear that Republicans as well as Democrats are allowed to take photographs in the White House; and where soldiers fight like crusaders with a unified people behind them.

In spite of an error in state etiquette, Margaret Bourke-White climaxed her trip by accomplishing the impossible: she received permission to make a candid portrait of Stalin. Her description of the technique of photographing a dictator is one of the many high spots of the book.

Shooting the Russian War is an exciting, sincere, and often humorous account by an American woman photographing the scenes in and around the greatest battle in the history of the world.

Table of Contents
Introduction: The White Nights of Moscow
1. Halfway Around the World
2. The Three Graces of China
3. Lanchow-the Gobi-Hami-Moscow
4. The Last Days of Peace
5. Way Down South in Georgia
6. The First Days of War
7. The Half-Ton Bomb
8. Daily Schedule
9. Moscow Air Raid
10. Microphones and a Boudoir Check
11. God in Russia
12. The Soviet Way
13. The Beginning of a Legend
14. I Photograph Stalin
15. We Go to the Front
16. Star Shells and Vodka on the Edge of No Man's Land
17. Death and Life on the Battlefields
18. White Nights in the Arctic
Glossary
Appendix