by Masha Gessen
My two grandmothers survived. My two grandmothers compromised. They made similar decisions for similar reasons: Ruzya became a censor while Ester agreed to work at the NKVD. That their stories are ultimately so different was a function of circumstance more than intention. Ester failed the medical exam and ultimately had nothing to atone for. Ruzya happened to be very good at her job.
Hers was not a mechanical job. The censors thought that they were working with clear guidelines and a transparent set of standards, but the foreign correspondents found the censorship to be frustratingly, mind-bogglingly changeable. A line that was cut from one correspondent’s copy might pass in another’s—especially if submitted during a different shift. The correspondents whiled away endless hours, possibly as many as they spent in the Central Telegraph hall waiting for their copy to be cleared, wondering about their censors—their personalities, tastes, and reasoning. “Who the censors are, how they are chosen, whether men or women—these questions have been subjects of endless, and sometimes bitter, speculation among correspondents, waiting into the night as dinners get cold and faraway editors get hot,” wrote Daniel Schorr in a New York Times Magazine article published in 1958, shortly after he returned from working as a CBS correspondent in Moscow. “It is believed that most of the censors are men, judging from the heavy hand (literally, as well as figuratively) with which they wield the black pencil.”
In 1997 I met Schorr and told him that the censor who mangled the Americans’ copy most often was a diminutive young Jewish woman, and I suggested that, since he still traveled the world, he might meet my grandmother one day. Schorr was dismayed to hear that she is Jewish, and taken aback at the prospect of meeting her. “After hating that guy for forty years, I don’t think I can face a sweet little lady,” he explained. “Tell her hello, and tell her that the rest of the message is deleted.”
I passed on the message nervously, but my grandmother greeted it with her most contagious laugh.
Meanwhile, in a short piece he wrote for National Public Radio, Schorr said that hearing about my grandmother was like learning who his “masked executioner” had been. This I chose not to pass on. He was talking about a land and a time when millions of people were executed—the only thing my grandmother butchered was copy.
Then I got hold of a long-out-of-print memoir by Harrison Salisbury, Ruzya’s all-time favorite charge. Salisbury was different: for several of the chilliest years of my grandmother’s tenure—the early 1950s—he was the only foreign newspaperman in Moscow: the rest were wire-service scribes, whose jobs did not require them to analyze the news. Unlike many of his colleagues, who stayed in Moscow because they were married to Russian women who could not leave, Salisbury, a bachelor, was not one of Stalin’s hostages. Nor did his political beliefs necessitate the sort of compromises that skewed some other Moscow correspondents’ dispatches. Salisbury had no special expertise on Russia when he arrived—he never really mastered the language—but he stayed for a long time, and he had a talent for noticing simple things. He was also possessed of a dogged determination to work the censorship system, sometimes hounding Glavlit with complaints, other times substituting his intuitive guesses for analysis in his stories—to see the censor’s reaction and gauge his own accuracy that way.
“What does a censor do with a cable which he or she passes verbatim after one hour and forty-five minutes—sit staring at it for one hour and forty-five minutes?” the huffy correspondent wrote in a letter to Omelchenko in February 1953. “Or does he or she sit drinking tea and reading light literature until the spirit moves him or her to do a small amount of work? Yours in some asperity, Harrison E. Salisbury.” The answer was neither, of course. In all likelihood, an hour and forty-five minutes was how long it took Ruzya to read the piece, translate one or two paragraphs that gave her pause, call them in to Stalin’s secretariat, and get them cleared.
But most of what Salisbury wrote was not cleared. In January 1950, for example, the censor killed thirteen—or about half—of Salisbury’s stories outright, and severely mangled the remainder. The reporter vacillated between badgering his editors at the New York Times to include a “cleared by Soviet censor” disclaimer with his articles (they never did) and trying to use the censorship system to obtain information. “I was impressed by the nuances that could be adduced by careful phrasing and rephrasing of my submissions to the censors,” he later wrote. In February 1950 Salisbury guessed that the Soviet Union wanted to indicate a willingness to enter into negotiations with the United States on some key issues, including atomic control. Unable to obtain confirmation in a conventional manner, he wrote a speculative story and waited for the censor’s reaction. The censor’s approval, which came after thirty hours, served as his confirmation. He proceeded to write four more dispatches on the subject, which were held up by Glavlit for five days before being cleared, presumably by Stalin himself. Salisbury even received a phone call from the Central Telegraph inviting him to come in and transmit the series.
For a journalist in Moscow, isolated and denied the usual tools of reporting—Salisbury was allowed neither to travel nor to have any contact with ordinary Soviet citizens—to be able to tell his readers anything new, as Salisbury occasionally managed to do, was a reporting coup. Not until a decade and a half later did he learn that his success very nearly cost him his life. The Soviet secret police were becoming increasingly harsh in dealings with foreign correspondents. In January 1949 NBC’s Bob Magidoff was accused of being a spy and thrown out of the country. A few weeks later Anna Louise Strong, an American reporter exceedingly sympathetic to the Soviet regime, was arrested on espionage charges and held for a week before being expelled from the country. The Russian staff of the Moscow Daily News, an English-language paper on which she had worked, stayed behind—in jail; the paper itself was shut down.
Around this time Salisbury, who had first worked in the Soviet Union during World War II, arrived for his second stint in Russia, and soon demonstrated an uncannily good understanding of his assignment. Whether he was writing stories that the Soviet authorities wanted published—as was the case with Stalin’s unspoken diplomatic initiatives—or banging his head against the wall writing pieces that would never see print, every time Salisbury’s intuition or his powers of observation yielded an unusually accurate guess, it affirmed someone’s suspicion that the journalist employed a well-placed source or sources. When a search for the leak proved fruitless, a discussion on eliminating Salisbury apparently ensued. As a Soviet defector would tell him many years later, there was a plan to give Salisbury a drug that would paralyze him and, if it did not kill him right away, necessitate his immediate evacuation; but some glitch in the plan granted the journalist a last-minute reprieve.
So here was the chain of events: Salisbury wandered the streets of Moscow, collecting tiny snippets of information where he could get them, and wrote his pieces. Ruzya translated them, often in their entirety, and killed them after calling them in to Stalin’s secretariat. Then she included them in the digests submitted to Omelchenko. Omelchenko’s secretary ran off the twenty or so copies that landed on various desks within the NKVD and Interior Ministry systems. The officers behind those desks read the journalist’s dispatches, were duly impressed, and made a plan to cripple him—or worse. Is there such a thing as an innocent cog in a killing machine?
In all fairness, unenviable as Salisbury’s position was, he probably faced lesser risks than any Soviet citizen—including the censor herself. But Salisbury’s writing would not have been half as good nor his perceptions half as sharp had he not allowed the Moscow of the early 1950s to chill him to the bone. As he recalled, when he read the announcement of the “Doctors’ Plot” on January 13, 1953, he instantly imagined the way the web would spread to envelop—to kill—many in Stalin’s inner circle, who would be accused of being agents of Zionism and world imperialism, drafted perhaps by George Kennan, the recently expelled U.S. ambassador to Moscow, who was aided in his dirty deed by, say, an Ameri
can journalist who lent him his dacha: Harrison Salisbury. So this was why my grandmother Ruzya still remembers Salisbury’s articles as the most torturously enjoyable part of her job: they were good journalism because they were about her, their main reader; they were terrifying because they were true. The censor and the reporter lived the same fear.
DECEMBER 1, 1999
“I knew,” says my grandmother Ruzya. “I was absolutely conscious that my work, to put it bluntly—that my work had a bad smell. But I held on to it quite consciously. More than that, I loved my job, because, in essence, I was a translator. I was a translator who had to produce very exact translations because I answered for them with my head, and my translations were immediately delivered by car or transmitted over a direct line all the way up as high as Stalin, you understand, and, basically, it was there that the decisions were made, while I just implemented them, so to speak. But nonetheless, of course, I never thought then and I continue not to think that the role I played is to my credit. I was compelled to do it because it was the period of that horrible anti-cosmopolitan campaign, so this was, you understand, a forced measure, of course, but at the same time it testified neither to the strength of my character nor to my courage nor to a desire to resist, you understand, it meant only that I acquiesced to the circumstances that life had forced on me. That’s all. Which is why I think that I do not look good in your book. Unlike your other grandmother, who has a hero’s biography.”
Ruzya holds to this opinion even when I remind her that Ester agreed to work for the NKVD. That job—translation and nothing but translation—would not have been shameful, she maintains. In any case, ultimately, Ester did not work for the NKVD, and so we remember only Biysk, where she refused to become an informer. And so Ruzya, as though forgetting that when she was sixteen she, too, refused a similar proposal, maintains that she is the one who compromised and my other grandmother, the hero, did not. Admiration untouched by jealousy is in that nod to jointly crafted family legend, which distributes the roles so neatly. Life happens to be more complicated.
PART SIX
STALIN’S FUNERAL
1953–1959
Ester and Sergei at the resort where they met.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MARCH 6, 1953, 7 A.M.
In the blue blackness of early morning Bella’s shouts ring out like cries for help, and Sasha is fully awake and ready to rush to her aid before he realizes she is screaming for joy.
“Dead!” she shouts. “He is dead!” she repeats, and turns the radio volume up as she leaves the kitchen to spread the word through the apartment, which she has already awakened with her screams.
Sasha stops in the hallway in front of his parents’ room to pull up his pajama bottoms and let his mother and his grandmother, rushing toward each other like long-lost lovers, meet in the doorway. His father sits up in bed looking on, frowning.
MARCH 6, 1953, 8 A.M.
Yolochka carries a sense of special knowledge with her today, and now that she has caught up to one of her classmates, also walking to school, she anticipates an opportunity to boast of it. The other girl looks like she has been crying, and she makes no effort to conceal her red eyes and nose the way an eleven-year-old normally would: there is something terribly adult in the way she is trying to project her grief.
“Comrade Stalin died,” she stage-whispers to Yolochka, skipping greetings that would seem lighthearted and inappropriate today.
“I know.” Yolochka seizes the opportunity. “They came to get my mother for work in the middle of the night, and I woke up and asked what happened. My mother said, ‘Nothing happened. Stalin died.’ ”
The girl, stricken, stares at Yolochka. “What do you mean, ‘Nothing happened’?” She starts to cry and breaks off from Yolochka, rushing toward the school, toward the company of other children and adults who would better understand her singular, terrifying loss.
At the school, children and adults alike are inconsolable and disoriented. Nothing, it is clear, is or can be the same anymore. Even the most difficult and serious of classes would seem frivolous in the face of grief. So children cry sitting at their desks while teachers force back tears to announce that school will let out early today. There will be no school tomorrow, they assume; indeed, it is hard to believe there will be school ever again.
Some girls seem overcome, wailing, flailing, shocking their classmates and teachers and deepening their sense that the world either has or is about to hurtle out of control. Yolochka wonders whether she, too, needs to cry. She tries to summon tears by thinking of the moment she learned of Stalin’s death, but her mother’s words—“Nothing happened”—make her feel calm, even sleepy. She can feel nothing of the emotions raging about her, but even she knows she cannot sit at her desk reading. She tries to sit idly instead, and she succeeds for a few long, torturous minutes, before she opens her textbook. The printed lines reassure her, but she tries her best to hold back from reading. Her hands find a soft-leaded black pencil, and she starts doodling in her textbook. She draws a thick black frame around a picture of Stalin in the book—the sort of frame the newspapers always place around the faces of dead people. Then carefully, in large, thickly drawn block letters, she writes HOLIDAY. She ascribes no joy to this word: she just means that there are no classes today.
MARCH 7, 1953, 9 A.M.
At first Ruzya mistakes it for quiet. It is not; it is the absence of the usual frenetic Gorky Street current, the Brownian motion of people and cars, each with its own separate urgency. Today this part of Gorky Street is closed off to civilian cars and to pedestrians who lack special passes—Ruzya has one because the Central Telegraph building, where she works, is located in the lower part of this street. There are still a fair number of people around, but even the way they walk seems different today, perhaps because their thoughts are united by a single focus: the body, lying in state barely three blocks away, in the Hall of Columns, the ostentatious, chandelier-flooded building across from the Kremlin. It is Stalin’s final stepping-stone on his way to the mausoleum in Red Square, where even now stonecutters are engraving his name next to Lenin’s over the entrance. And there is the quiet, which is not quiet at all but the distance of noise, which is coming to this deadened street from the cordons, formed by trucks whose drivers are constantly gunning their engines to keep from freezing, and from Bolshaya Dmitrovka, the street just below Gorky, where hundreds of thousands are marching, pushing, trampling, clawing, and crawling to see the dead man, to bow their heads before the ruler one last time.
It has been a long, hard, wonderful day. It began more than twenty-four hours ago, with the messenger ringing her bell and stating the news right there on the threshold. It was not the first time she was fetched in the middle of the night when she was resting after a day shift: lesser stories, or the whims of American reporters, had often required her presence at the Central Telegraph. Sometimes she found it annoying, other times she was glad to be yanked out of her mother’s house with its endless quibbles and quarrels. But this time she felt a warmth, a happiness, spread steadily through her being as she awoke and dressed and steered her mind toward the story she knew she was about to read over and over. An initial communique on Stalin’s ailment had come out two days earlier, signaling that someone on high thought things quite hopeless. In fact, she thought at the time that he might already be dead. In any case, she was not surprised when the news came to her doorstep, and she was certain of how she felt about it.
The driver delivered her to the Central Telegraph building around the same time that correspondents began to arrive, apparently prepared to sit vigil for as long as it took; she knew they had been frantic and sleepless for two days. Salisbury had apparently been moved to write something, anything, during the wait: there were two stories on her desk, one about the ways Moscow correspondents have of begging Stalin by letter for information handouts and the other about Stalin’s early attempts at poetry. There was a lengthy quote in this story, full of blooming flowers,
flying larks, and seventeen-year-old patriotism. Ruzya read the two stories and pushed them aside with a smile: these were not standard regurgitative fare, so they could not be cleared at her level, and she was certain there would be no one on hand to wave them through from the top. More writing for her eyes only.
At 4 A.M. exactly, TASS, the government news agency, cabled the news. Salisbury was first off the mark, with a story already written. Within minutes, she heard shouting and banging from the correspondents’ waiting room, then an odd screeching pop—and then a silence that she assumed to be of the shocked variety. The secretary walked in, her face already tear-streaked and her hair somehow disheveled. From what Ruzya could gather from the young woman’s disjointed, sobbing report, the correspondents had very nearly stormed the counter and the room’s two phone booths, but the switchboard operator had long since received instructions to put no international calls through. The correspondents had lost all fear and sense of decorum, and a technician had put a stop to the pandemonium by removing the back of the switchboard and yanking out the main cable.
