My Grandmother, the Censor

There are two things I ought to make clear. First, almost as soon as she starts telling me about her career (as we wade through the sleet from the bus stop to the market), my grandmother declares that the head of the department, Alexei Lukich Zorin, was a good, decent man.

Second, as I listen to the story, as we wade through the sleet from the bus stop to the market place, I am surprised but not horrified, even though my Baba Ruzya has told me that for eleven key postwar years she censored what the rest of the world could learn about the Soviet Union.

There are certain things she remembers very well. Certain journalists. Walter Cronkite from UPI—he filed a lot of stories, but it was your regular wire copy stuff, dry and dull, “amazingly boring.” But Max Frankel from the New York Times. There was a writer to be savoured. “He had his own point of view, you see, and he just expressed it how he wanted, so bravely.” She translated his articles in their entirety and sent them by messenger to Stalin’s secretary. Hours later, Frankel’s “corrected” copy would go over the wire to New York. Every day at the end of her shift—generally it ended in the morning, since most dispatches went out overnight—she prepared a summary of the day’s news for Stalin’s office, mainly a circular exercise of translating back into Russian what foreign correspondents had culled from Soviet newspapers—a re-spinning of Soviet stories was pretty much all that was allowed out. “Altogether I worked at Glavlit for fifteen years, and never in that time did I make a mistake in translation.” I believe her. And anyway, she would have known if she had. Mistakes were lethal.

Certain episodes she remembers very well. The Doctors’ Plot episode. The Stalin death episode. The Fellini episode.

The Doctors’ Plot began in 1952. She heard of it originally from a typist in the office. But first you have to know how frightened Ruzya was by then of losing her job. The Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign was entering its fifth year, the fifth year of rabid official anti-Semitism, the fifth year that Jews could not find work or hold on to university places. Without her job, Ruzya and her child would have faced a desperate life. And you have to know that she was the only Jew in the department that controlled foreign correspondents, and that she was the only staff member who did not belong to the Party. By this time she was so afraid of losing her job that she would have joined—but she no longer could, because she was Jewish. And the typist said: “You know, they are going to exile the Jews to Siberia.”

And then the correspondents began to write stories saying the same thing. It was obvious, really; Stalin had exiled other ethnic groups in their entirety: he had moved the Chechens and the Ingush from the Caucasus to Siberian Kazakhstan; he had moved the Tartars from the Crimea, and the Germans from the Volga; and now that the Jews were the scapegoats of the nation, he would surely move them too. The Anti-Cosmopolitan drama was clearly drawing to a climax, with every Soviet newspaper hot on the heels of the Doctors’ Plot, the chilling story of a conspiracy by Jewish doctors to kill innocent Soviet citizens. They were called the “killers in white coats.” As the story went, there would be show trials, executions in Red Square, and pogroms throughout the country. Then, in a show of saving the Jews, the magnanimous Soviet government would exile them to northern Siberia.

The correspondents kept writing about this likely sequence of events, and she kept crossing it out. It was obvious to her that the stories were true, and it was obvious that she could not let them through, because every day that she did her job well enough to keep it was another day when she might not be deported. In effect, these correspondents were writing for her, reminding her of her future several times every night.

In the day, when she slept, she had a recurring nightmare. She is in a cattle car, cradling her ten-year-old daughter, who is asking for a drink of water. But she has no water.

When important events happened on one of Ruzya’s nights off, a messenger would appear at the door. In 1953, she was living with her parents again. In the early hours of 4 March that year, the messenger said, “Comrade Stalin has died, and Comrade Solodovnik is summoned to work.” Her mother started wailing. Ruzya thought: “I have a moron for a mother.”

That is how my grandmother remembers it. My own mother had a different memory. She woke up to see her mother dressing for work at four in the morning. “Mama, what happened?” she said.

“Nothing important, dear. Stalin died. Go back to sleep.”