Happy birthday, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is the birthday of Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918), who won the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature for his body of work, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963) and The Gulag Archipelago (1972). Both books, and much of his other work, take to task the repressive Soviet regime of the Cold War era and its forced labor camps. Solzhenitsyn's work was banned in the Soviet Union and he was expelled in 1974. He went to Germany, then Switzerland, before settling in the United States, where he became a harsh critic of western culture as well. After the USSR was dissolved, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia. He died at age 89 in Moscow.

Happy birthday, Margaret Bourke-White

It is the birthday of photographer Margaret Bourke-White (1904), who broke several gender barriers in her career, including becoming the first woman combat photographer and the first woman photographer for Life magazine. She was also the first foreign photographer allowed to shoot pictures in Soviet Russia. Her photograph of the Fort Peck Dam appeared on the cover of the first Life magazine in 1936. One of her most famous pictures, Kentucky Flood, was taken of Dust Bowl victims during the Depression in the 1930s. 

Herman Kahn: the real Dr. Strangelove

Herman Kahn

It is the birthday of futurist Herman Kahn (1922), whose book On Thermonuclear War (1960) made the case during the Cold War that a policy of massive nuclear retaliation against the Soviet Union was sheer lunacy. It was a controversial assertion at a time with tensions between the world's great superpowers were at an all time high. Kahn suggested that the policy of the Eisenhower administration invited nuclear attack because it gave the Soviets an incentive to aim missiles at U.S. bomber bases in advance of any conventional military operation.

The Soviet Union held the advantage of sheer number of soldiers at that time and U.S. officials thought that the only way to prevent Soviet aggression was to threaten a nuclear attack in response.

Kahn said that nuclear war was feasible and winnable. He argued that life would go on after such a war, whether a few major cities were destroyed or hundreds of millions of people died. He noted that in 14th century Europe life continued after the bubonic plague killed as many as 200 million people. Kahn argued that no matter how bad the devastation was survivors would "not envy the dead."

If you believed otherwise, Kahn said, then deterrence was unnecessary. If Americans weren't willing to push the button, then they ought not to be talking about attacking the Soviets, he said. For the idea to work, Soviets had to believe that the United States could not only survive a nuclear attack but that it could strike back. That belief in a "second strike" capability was paramount in convincing Soviet leaders that they would be destroyed if they attacked the United States, Kahn said.

Kahn incurred the anger of some people because he was perfectly willing to articulate what might happen if there were to be thermonuclear war, and what the world might look like when it was over. Some thinkers criticized Kahn for his ideas, saying that his suggesting that a nuclear war was winnable make it more likely that one would occur. However, prominent pacifists such as Bertrand Russell praised Kahn, saying his ideas made a strong case for disarmament.

Kahn was the inspiration for the title character in Stanley Kubrick's 1954 black comedy film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Salisbury wrote of Russia, Vietnam, China

Harrison Salisbury

It is the birthday of journalist Harrison Salisbury (1908), who won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1955 for a series of stories he wrote after serving as the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times. Salisbury was one of the Times' top editors. He also reported from Vietnam and China. He was a prolific writer, the author of 29 books.

Salisbury began working for United Press after being suspended from the University of Minnesota in 1930. He never graduated. He served as UP's foreign editor during the last two years of World War II, and traveled with the Red Army as it pursued the retreating Germans. In 1945, he wrote a series for Collier's Weekly about Russia that became a book Russia on the Way (1946). He served as the Times' Moscow bureau chief for five years beginning in 1949. In Russia, he constantly sparred with Soviet officials over censorship, though he was criticized by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and by writer Gay Talese (The Kingdom and the Power) for being too sympathetic to the Soviets.

Salisbury served as the Times' chief of domestic correspondents during the 1960s and covered the Civil Rights struggle in the South. He directed the coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He visited North Vietnam in 1966 and became convinced that the United States policy of pursuing the air war was a bad policy as it was killing thousands of civilians. He was the first American journalist to report on the war from North Vietnam and among the first to oppose the war.

Salisbury also traveled extensively in China. He witnessed the student uprising in Tiananmen Square in 1989 that led to a bloody massacre at the hands of the Chinese military.

Salisbury's books include American in Russia (1955), The Shook-Up Generation (1968), Behind the Lines: Hanoi (1967), Orbit of China (1967), War Between Russia and China (1969), The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (1969), The Gates of Hell (1975), Black Night, White Snow: Russia's Revolutions 1905-1917 (1978), Without Fear or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times (1980), Journey For Our Times (autobiography) (1983), China: 100 Years of Revolution (1983), The Long March: The Untold Story (1985), Tiananmen Diary: Thirteen Days in June (1989), The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng (1992), Heroes of My Time (1993).

Salisbury died from a sudden heart attack in Connecticut in 1993 at the age of 84.

Boris Pasternak turned down Nobel Prize

It is the birthday of Russian novelist and poet Boris Pasternak (1890), whose book Doctor Zhivago (1957) was banned in his native land and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel is a sweeping saga set at the end of Czarist Russia and the beginning of the Soviet Union. The ruling Communist Party's negative reaction to the prize led Pasternak to decline it. Pasternak's poetry collection, My Sister's Life (1921), revolutionized Russian poetry. He also translated plays by Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller and Pedro Calderón de la Barca into Russian.