by Masha Gessen
Mikhoels had chosen a show to answer the survivors’ desperate love of life. But, had he wanted to stage a play that was a memorial rather than a celebration, it most likely would have been banned, the way the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’s Black Book, a monumental effort documenting the Nazi murder of Soviet Jews, was banned, the way more and more Jewish literature was banned, the way the Jewish Theater would soon be shut down—and Mikhoels himself killed.
How does one begin to understand why something is banned—or, as Ruzya had to do, when something ought to be banned? As a novice censor at Glavlit, Ruzya studied memos like this one explaining why a U.S.-published biography of Albert Einstein could not be allowed:
1) The author of the introduction recommends studying the works of contemporary reactionary philosophers John Dewey, G. Santayana, G. Mupa, Bertrand Russell and others. In several places in the introduction the author calls such backwards personalities as Bertrand Russell, J. Dewey and others “great thinkers.”
3) In the chapter called “Einstein’s Social Philosophy,” the author relays Einstein’s thinking: Einstein believes that the world is facing a crisis and that humanity is in danger of a catastrophe. The only salvation lies in organizing the intellectual and spiritual forces of the world into one moral force, something like the “conscience of the world.” Morality is the highest value of all, such is Einstein’s credo. Never do anything that contradicts your conscience, even if the state demands it.…
So morality fell outside the law because it might contradict state policy. And memory fell outside the law, too, because it could contradict the official version of history. For these reasons, as well as the obvious analogy with Stalinist concentration camps, the Black Book was banned. For the most part, thought itself fell outside the law. So the censor, whether she was reading “incoming printed matter” or outgoing reportage, occupied one of the small spots of cosmopolitanism in the country. Glavlit, the Head Directorate on Affairs of Literature and Publishing, founded in 1922, now employed 233 people in its Moscow offices and in management positions elsewhere and about five thousand more throughout the Soviet Union. This group was one of the Soviet Union’s tiny islands where a sort of enlightenment was, bizarrely, cultivated. Glavlit records contain the text of a speech by the head of the directorate, Konstantin Omelchenko, in which he stressed the importance of a well-rounded, continuing education for the censors. “The censor should be familiar with the history of censorship,” said Omelchenko, a man Ruzya would come to know well. “We should think about choosing four or five of the most cultured and experienced staff members and assign them to prepare, over the course of two months, lectures on the history of censorship.… Foreign languages must be studied.… The censor should exert a generalizing influence. We have to analyze the processes that occur in literature. No one knows literature as well as the censor does.”
Of course not. Because virtually no one had access to the sort of literature that the censors could read. Take For Whom the Bell Tolls and tally up the reasons it could not have been allowed: the author was ideologically unreliable—neither a Soviet sympathizer nor safely dead, which meant he could make a comment about the Soviet Union at any moment; the book showed the Spanish communists as terrorists; the book included questioning of acceptable violence against the class enemy; the book contained sex scenes. Any one of these factors was sufficient to put the book on the banned list.
The books available to the general Soviet public were a literature of elisions, and in a sense this was as it should be: literature reflected life. The central feature of Soviet life was unspoken. This feature was fear. For Ruzya’s generation fear turned into a habit. Before they finished high school, Ruzya’s gang had learned to shout praise for the Soviet Union into the ceiling vent—a gesture that was probably of little practical use but helped stave off the fear. As soon as telephones were installed in their apartments, they developed the habit of placing pillows over them to disable them as bugging devices. This went along with the habit of writing the most sensitive information on scraps of paper and then ripping them into shreds. Ruzya had the habit of saying, when conversation veered into risky territory, “Comrades! We live on the ground floor, and the window is open.” In other words, do not forget to be afraid that you may be overheard.
The fear began in the late 1920s or early 1930s, when they were still children. They became increasingly aware of it as they grew into adults. The fear of being denounced and arrested did not abate even during the war: soldiers were regularly plucked out of their platoons for saying a wrong word.
After the war, the fear grew more specific. On January 13, 1948, Solomon Mikhoels, the actor, was killed, signaling to the Jews of this generation that they were now the punitive machine’s main target. The targeting of Jews began earlier, of course. When? Some people think it started in 1946, with print attacks on Yiddish-language writers whose work was apparently found to contain “expressions of Jewish nationalism.” That same year, prominent novelist Nikolay Tikhonov published an article called “In Defense of Pushkin” in the newspaper Sovetskaya kultura. Tikhonov accused a literary critic named Isak Nusinov, whom he called “a vagabond without a passport,” of trying “vampirically” to “Westernize” the great Russian poet. Various other substitutes for “wandering Jew” made the newspaper rounds until the name for the state’s new enemy was firmly established: “rootless cosmopolitans.” The state never called anything by its real name, and this provided its loyal citizens with additional motivation: they were always striving to show they understood their orders. This was how Bella came to be fired from her job teaching Polish to Soviet intelligence officers: certainly they could not be taught by a “rootless cosmopolitan.”
One of the most concise definitions of the new enemy appeared later, in the lead article of a 1949 issue of Voprosy istorii (The Issues of History), the scholarly journal that would have been Ruzya’s bible had she found work as a history teacher: “The rootless cosmopolitans … falsify and misrepresent the worldwide historical role of the Russian people in the construction of socialist society and the victory over the enemy of humanity—over German fascism—in the Great Patriotic War.”
Russian, in Russian, is an exclusive term: it means ethnic Russians only. So, translated into practice, this passage meant that any historian who neglected to sing the praises of the heroic ethnic Russians, regardless of the time period and even the place discussed, was a likely traitor. Usually these traitors had Jewish surnames; though, on rare occasions, a person with a different name was thrown in for good measure (as were some ethnic Russians who happened to have Jewish-sounding last names).
Before the war, internationalist rhetoric had ruled in the Soviet Union and the concept of Russian ethnicity was taboo. But then Stalin signaled that this was changing. During a Kremlin reception to honor Red Army commanders on May 24, 1945, he made a toast: “I would like to raise my glass to the health of our Soviet people and, first and foremost, the Russian people.” Here, as the official transcript indicates, Stalin was interrupted by “active and long-lasting applause and the shouts of ‘hooray!’ ” He continued: “I drink first to the health of the Russian people because they are the most outstanding nation of all the nations that make up the Soviet Union. I raise my glass to the health of the Russian people because it earned in this war general recognition as the leading force of the Soviet Union among all the peoples of our country. I raise my glass to the health of the Russian people not only because it is the leading people but also because it has a clear mind, a stalwart character and patience.” That Stalin himself belonged to an ethnic minority—he was half Georgian and half Ossetian—had no tempering influence on the new policies of xenophobia.
That speech signaled the official beginning of the process, speedy and thorough, of excising Jews from the history of the war. Newspaper articles referred to Jews who sat out the war in Central Asia with such venom and frequency that the assertion became commonplace within weeks. In reality, virtually a
ll able-bodied Jewish men served in the wartime Red Army and about two hundred thousand of them died in its ranks. Jews had the largest proportion, of any Soviet ethnic group, of Heroes of the Soviet Union—the highest military honor awarded. This may have been a measure of their relative desperation more than anything else, but this part of Jewish history, too—the death of about a million Soviet Jews at the hands of the Nazis, and the deadly threat the rest faced—was systematically obliterated on orders from the top, even as it was occurring. “Hitler wanted to turn the Jews into a target,” wrote the writer Ilya Ehrenburg in his regular call-to-arms column in 1942. “The Jews of Russia showed him that a target can shoot.… Once upon a time the Jews dreamed of a promised land. Now the Jew’s promised land is the front line of defense.” The following year Ehrenburg was told to tone down the Jewish references.
Stalin’s antagonism toward the Jews probably predated any sign he gave of it in public. One Hitler-era memoir recounts Ribbentrop’s report on his negotiations with Soviet officials: “Stalin made it clear that he is waiting only for the moment when the USSR will have enough educated people of its own to finally put an end to Jewish dominance.” This statement did not become public in Russia until the mid-1990s. But at some point in the 1940s—as early as 1943 for some, perhaps around the time of Mikhoels’s murder in 1948 for most, and certainly before the arrests of a group of Jewish doctors in 1953 for all—every Jewish man and woman living in the Soviet Union came to realize that they were targeted by the regime, to feel that hopeless fear in every bone.
For most of the Jews of the wartime generation, this fear eventually pushed out the hunger for life with which they had come home, leaving only the desperate wish to survive, a cornered animal’s bloodshot hope.
FEBRUARY 1946
Ruzya’s eyes are red, as they always are in the afternoons, after hours of reading. It is freezing, as it always is on Saturdays, when the office cleaning lady refuses to work, even though she does come in when she is supposed to and leave when she is supposed to. She is in her fifties, graying, short and somehow crooked, and she speaks—grumbles, rather, about the mess they make, the mud they drag in—with a strong shtetl accent, and nothing, no amount of ridicule, some of it anti-Semitic and some generically anti-religious, all of it unmistakably mean-spirited, can force her to put firewood in the little black-metal stove on the Sabbath. The war has been over for nine months and in some ways Moscow is really back to normal, but central heating in the main post office still has not been repaired, so on weekdays the “political editors” sweat in the stifling heat from the woodstove, and on Saturdays they try to work the stove themselves, but it requires attention and each of them has more work than a human being can possibly do, so the stove goes out and the coats go on, and still they freeze. Ruzya marvels at the cleaning lady’s resolve, at her showing up every Saturday to freeze with them, but she has never said anything, because anything she says will somehow be a comment on the woman’s Jewishness, or on Ruzya’s.
She is not the only Jew among the editors: there is Zhenia Galperin, a skinny one-armed polyglot. As the story goes, years ago, before the war, he was trampled in a tram so crowded that his arm had to be amputated. Somehow this accident, or maybe the amount of time he needed to recuperate, moved Zhenia to study foreign languages, one after another. Then he wound up at Glavlit, and until recently he was even living in some room—more like a janitor’s closet—off this endless hallway. He must have lost his apartment while he was evacuated—this happened to many people who failed to keep their documents current and could not fight the squatters. Or it may have been some sort of a family conflict—no one really knows. But Zhenia is so valuable to Glavlit that he is allowed to live here; once Ruzya spotted his one spare shirt and a pair of foot-wraps hung to dry in the janitor’s closet. Zhenia is allowed such transgressions because he can read in a dozen languages fast, and he rarely makes mistakes.
They all make mistakes, of course, all the dozen or so “political editors.” There is no way to read every word in the stacks that pile up on their desks, and so they skim, with varying skill, but it is so easy to skip over that one line that will soon be caught by the frightened director of some small library where the book or the magazine lands. Ruzya overlooked The Letters of Georges Bizet, and soon enough it was back at the Glavlit offices, with passages circled: “Paris has fallen too low even for corruption. We have no more revolutions, only the parodies of revolutions.” Blasphemy. She had paid little attention to the book, figuring that something written a century ago could hardly be anti-Soviet and she should spend more time on the contemporary books. She had, as she recalls, a parcel from “the Brother” on her desk that day, and that always made her uneasy, even anxious.
These packages from France come every couple of weeks, books—mostly scientific books on biology but also fiction—and scientific journals, full of diagrams and indecipherable terms, the bane of her existence. They are addressed to a man somewhere in the Arkhangel’sk region, beyond the Arctic Circle. She commented on them once, and Zhenia relayed the legend: the sender was a Russian nobleman, an artist who emigrated to Paris right after the revolution; the addressee was his brother, a biologist, who stayed in Russia and was exiled to the Arctic years ago. The books and magazines were usually shipped off to restricted-access libraries, and only a rare volume, once every few months or so, was cleared and sent to the Arkhangel’sk region.
Everyone in the department knows this story, and no one, she thinks, wants to handle these parcels. So much better to censor the books shipped by impersonal publishers to anonymous libraries. Though two more women—her former classmates—have been hired since the war ended and the inflow increased, Ruzya is still the newest French-reading member of the department, so she has brother duty. And there is a pile of books for him on her desk again today.
The door opens, letting in a blast of prickly, frozen air from the corridor. It is a secretary from the larger room next door, where the supporting staff open and sort incoming packages and transfer the censors’ marks to copies before shipping the materials to their assigned destinations. She picks up the stack of read materials from Ruzya’s desk and says, “The department director has asked you to stop in at three.” A tension spreads quickly through the room, the censors lifting their heads to scan the secretary’s and Ruzya’s faces for signs of worry. Then everyone is looking back down at the publications on their desks; two of the censors are twisting tooth-marked round pencils in their fingers; Zhenia, Ruzya can tell from the way he is squinting, is scanning the magazine on his desk for some innocuously funny line to read out to his colleagues. She looks at her watch: she has another fifteen minutes, enough for the Daily Worker.
The head of the department is a colorless middle-aged woman who has been understanding and helpful to Ruzya. Everyone else here works nine to five, but Ruzya, as a single mother, is allowed to work from eight to four. All in all, Glavlit’s Department of Incoming Printed Matter is a very humane place to work, which does not, of course, mean that there might not have been a report, a denunciation, some kind of trouble, and that makes Ruzya’s knock a bit uncertain. She knocks again, too loud now, then enters and tries to search the woman’s face, which is bland and blank as usual.
“Please sit down,” the woman says, and puts aside a drab-brown folder. It must be someone else’s personnel file, Ruzya registers, but then she does not know whether this is a good sign or a bad one. “There is a transfer request for you.”
Ruzya clears her throat, and it comes out embarrassingly high-pitched. Transfer is a vague term.
“The department for work with foreign correspondents is being moved out of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and into Glavlit,” the woman says. “They will be giving Glavlit some of their people, and a few more will come from the services, but they need our help, and they’ve asked for multilingual personnel. All of the Foreign Ministry people read only one foreign language. I have recommended you. The pay is half again what you get her
e now.”
“Thank you.”
“So you are agreeing?”
“Yes, of course, I would like it very much.” She really would like it very much. She already likes it very much, because she is tired of her current job—true—but more than that, because she was chosen for the only thing that makes her truly proud: her language aptitude. She has been chosen for a promotion! She, a Jewish girl!
“You’ll have to go to the head office on Monday for a language test. They will be setting up at the Central Telegraph.”
“Thank you.”
She will soon learn that this is a real promotion, a step up to tangible privilege. On days when she has to submit written reports to Omelchenko, the head of Glavlit, she will be driven to his office and then home. She will have a direct line to Stalin’s secretariat. Best of all, when a correspondent from a new country is accredited, she will be crash-taught his language.
The way her father says “congratulations” makes her want to disappear.
NOVEMBER 30, 1947
The Central Telegraph building, with its catholic architectural aspirations, its digital clock and its multicolored half-globe on the facade, and its location just two blocks up Gorky Street from Red Square, is one of Moscow’s most assertive landmarks. Its facade is that of a stunted Gothic temple updated with flashy modern touches. But this facade is one of those lies that, for the attentive observer, makes Moscow a city of easy metaphors. The facade is designed for a building an eighth the size of the Central Telegraph. In fact, the building takes up an entire city block and possesses a multitude of separate entrances, some easier and some more difficult to spot, each with a separate system of stairways and corridors. Entrance ten, an unremarkable side-street door, leads to the telegraph hall for foreign correspondents. In a room adjacent to the hall, shielded by a curtained door, the censors do their work openly but invisibly. Foreign correspondents have to file their stories from this hall, and they have to submit them to the censor first: such are the terms of their stay in the Soviet Union.
