Carrie Callaghan’s Salt the Snow

Review by Norah Vawter

Carrie Callaghan’s historical novel Salt the Snow is so rich in detail that I found myself transported to the streets of 1930s Moscow. The frigid cold of the Russian winter is palpable—along with the stark living conditions, the nineteenth century mansion that’s been repurposed as a newspaper office, the smart parties where expatriates gather to listen to music and talk about socialism, the taste of Milly’s first sip of vodka. 

Salt the Snow is the fictionalized story of a real person: Milly Bennett (1897-1960) an American journalist who lived a bold life, outside society’s expectations of how women should behave. She was a socialist, a radical who traveled to far-flung places like China and Russia to bear witness to political and social upheaval, and to contribute to the cause of socialism. Bennett was only one of many American women in this period who became so attracted to the radical gender equality and social programs available to women in the USSR that they actually moved to Russia. But today, she’s all but forgotten. In order to get the details of Bennett’s story right, and to provide such a rich level of specificity, Callaghan (who first learned about Milly Bennett while doing research for her master’s degree in Advanced International Studies at Hopkins) dove deep into research and Bennett’s own papers—letters, diaries, and unpublished manuscripts housed in Stanford’s Hoover Institution Archives. Though this is a work of fiction, Callaghan has said that she stuck close to the truth. The wealth of source material, including so much writing in Bennett’s own hand, allowed Callaghan to be quite faithful to history.

The author, who lives in Maryland and is a senior editor with the Washington Independent Review of Books, is on familiar ground with Milly Bennett. Her first novel, A Light of Her Own, also tells the fictionalized story of a real woman, Dutch painter Judith Leyster. When asked about how she sees her work intersecting with social change and the real world, Carrie Callaghan told me, “My novels are both about ambitious women struggling against inhospitable circumstances. One of my motivating passions is using fiction to explore social issues, so the message is not didactic, and people come into the reading experience with their guards down. ... I adore using historical fiction to explore all the ways humans have lived, and in some cases, [how] the achievements [of marginalized people are] sidelined by the powers that be (embodied by white men).”  

Milly travels from San Francisco to the Soviet Union in 1931, chasing adventure and a cause greater than herself. She has a job waiting for her at the Moscow Daily News, Russia’s first English language newspaper, founded by Anna Louise Strong, an American socialist, who Milly had worked with in China in the 1920s. (Strong was a real woman. This real-life publication was generally called The Moscow News, and ran until 2014.) Milly is in love with the ideals of socialism. She’s excited about the promise of women’s rights, but she’s also entranced by general tenets of socialism. She really believes that the USSR is a beautiful experiment, and that she is helping to create a new world. We meet up with her in 1934, though the first half of the book alternates between this present and flashbacks of the last three years. Now, she’s firmly entrenched in the reality of Soviet life, the good and the bad, the ideals and the oppression. She’s even married to a Russian. Life isn’t perfect, but it’s stable. Then her husband Zhenya is arrested for counter-revolutionary activities.

Milly has no idea what crimes against the state Zhenya could be guilty of. But her husband has secrets. As Milly struggles to learn why he was arrested, and to fight for his freedom, she finds herself in an ever-complicated dance. How hard can she fight for Zhenya without putting him in more danger, or being labeled a counter-revolutionary herself? Worse, the truth about her beautiful husband—younger, happier, and more attractive than Milly—makes her question everything. Has she ever truly known this man? And if their partnership is built on a lie, what’s wrong with her?

Milly Bennett is confident in every other aspect of her life. She’s ballsy as hell. She talks back to men: to the secret police and newspaper editors alike. She demands to be heard. She takes risks because she’s ambitious, wants to matter, and refuses to be silenced like so many other women. But when it comes to romance, Milly’s confidence evaporates.

Believing herself unattractive, fundamentally not good enough, she settles for the scraps of attention she receives from men. She lets herself be treated poorly. Milly’s ideas and ideals are so modern, but her heart is not. Her vulnerability and insecurities also seep into her professional life. Deep down, this badass woman can’t escape the notion that she has less agency than male colleagues, and that a woman’s fate depends on how she is seen by men.

These basic contradictions are mirrored by a long list of social and political contradictions that Milly learns are inherent to Soviet life. We see many characters who are idealistic and hardcore in their beliefs about socialism and this beautiful new experiment. But that purity is juxtaposed with the reality of life in the USSR, political oppression, red tape, and fear. As the years go on, and fascism rises in Europe, the Soviet regime tightens its grip on its people. Americans and Russians alike feel less free to act and speak. The revolution broke all the rules. Now, to be revolutionary, you must follow the rules. Over and over Milly compromises her ideals, censors herself, tells herself that censorship is necessary for the greater good. Like her relationships with men, her relationship with socialism is complicated and full of contradictions. 

Like many works of historical fiction that are heavily researched and generally faithful to what really happened, the greatest strength of Salt the Snow is also its weakness. The research and specificity. At times I felt lost in the minutia of people, facts, and incidents. The gold mine of Bennett’s papers allows Callaghan to construct a novel so rich in details that you can imagine yourself in 1930s Moscow. But it also allows for the narrative to be tied too closely to what really happened. Callaghan did cut out a number of characters and simplified some aspects of the story. Which definitely helps. But on a more fundamental level: fiction and nonfiction don’t follow the same rules. All the information about Bennett’s real life that we’re presented with in the novel is surely relevant to a biography of Bennett. But it’s not necessarily relevant to Milly’s fictional story. Callaghan could have created a tighter narrative by giving herself more license to fictionalize, and honing in on the emotional heart of the story, which I see as Milly’s marriage and her struggle to be loved, to believe that she deserves to be loved and treated well by men. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this ride. I’m still thinking about Milly and Soviet Moscow. Salt the Snow is a fascinating, entertaining novel that sheds light on a piece of history I knew almost nothing about before I opened the book. Milly Bennett deserves to be remembered, and I’m so glad that Carrie Callaghan has taken the time to so carefully, and I think lovingly, reconstruct the story of this American girl in Red Russia.

You can buy Salt the Snow at Amazon, or even better, support local bookstores by purchasing your copy at Politics and Prose or Arlington’s One More Page.

Carrie Callaghan is the author of the historical novels A Light of Her Own (2018) and Salt the Snow (2020). Her short stories have been published in multiple literary journals around the country, and she is a senior editor with the Washington Independent Review of Books. She lives in Maryland with her family and two ridiculous cats. She loves seasons of all kinds, history, and tea.