He Was The Times’s Moscow Chief. My Grandmother Was His Censor.
When I was a kid in Moscow, my grandmother told me that New York was the greatest city in the world, The New York Times was the greatest newspaper in the world, and Harrison Salisbury was its greatest journalist. She had made these determinations decades before she ever saw New York City or held a copy of The Times in her hands. As for Salisbury, she never met him. For several years, though, she read almost every article he wrote. She was also his government censor, the person whose job, at the Chief Directorate of Literature and Publishing, was to keep much of his work from ever being published.
M. Gessen, writing at the NY Times, remembers his grandmother, her career as a censor and Salisbury’s career as a foreign correspondent in Moscow.
Salisbury covered the USSR for the Times during World War II, left, and fought to never go back. But he returned in 1949.
He seemed to grasp the biggest story almost immediately. The Soviet government was waging a campaign to identify and imprison “rootless cosmopolitans” — a code word for “Jews.”
He wrote a story about the campaign, which Gessen’s grandmother censored.
My grandmother remembered this article as revelatory. But it contained nothing she didn’t already know. For more than a year, she and her circle of friends – young Jewish intellectuals in Moscow – had been living with a growing sense of fear. Many of them had had their university studies interrupted by the war and were just now, in their late 20s, graduating to find out that Jews had become all but unemployable. They read all the reports of high-profile Jewish writers, actors and critics being denounced, demoted and jailed, and they were sure this was just the beginning. Salisbury’s article reflected these facts and fears back to my grandmother.