the grannies.
..., where they would be cleared by the censor. I have loved the Central Telegraph building since I was a child—for its rotating multicoloured globe, its digital clock, and its catholic architectural aspirations. My grandmother's office had a door through which the clerk brought the dispatches, an electric bell she rang when she was done with a piece, and two telephones. She used one for routine calls, and the other when in doubt, to telephone her translation of a text directly to Stalin's secretariat. Every time a correspondent from a new country was accredited, she was crash-taught his language. German, French and English she knew already. Italian, Czech, Romanian, Polish—none of these were a problem. But Hungarian—no matter how much she struggled, she could not get past the dictionary. 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 post-war 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.' Here is an episode they both remembered. There would be no classes, the teacher announced on 4 March, because Comrade Stalin had died. The other children wailed. My mother drew a thick black frame, signifying death, around Stalin's portrait in her textbook, and wrote holiday, signifying no school. Happening to glance at the page, the teacher ripped the textbook out of the girl's hands and summoned her mother to the school. 'Buy your child a new textbook and explain some things to her,' the teacher said. We were lucky to have happened upon a teacher like that, family legend concludes: a teacher who concealed instead of informing. After Stalin died, there were the days of carnage and fear. Gorky Street, the avenue that led past the Central Telegraph to Red Square, was closed to all vehicles and people. Parallel streets teemed with human traffic, hundreds of thousands who had walked for days to view the body of the Father of the Nation. Those who worked or lived on Gorky Street were issued special passes that enabled them to pass through the barricades of military trucks. My grandmother was one of those let through. 'On my way to work I stopped by the stores, and it was delightful. I was able to buy things I could never have had. I bought calf tongue—imagine, calf tongue!—it cost pennies back then, it's just that you could never get it, but there I was practically the only customer.' But it was frightening. It was still cold, and the truck drivers kept gunning their engines, and the roar of the crowds on the other streets mixed with the roar of the engines and filled the empty street with dread. She and her child shared a room in a giant communal flat in a basement off Trubnaya Ploshad, a square at the bottom of two hills, just below the streets that led to the Body. People fell over and got trampled in the crush. Bodies rolled down the streets on to Trubnaya Ploshad. They were carried past their basement windows—endlessly, it seemed. 'People said, "He lived in blood and died in blood." But you know, others, the idiots, they cried and cried. It was frightening. And then the happy day came when the newspapers announced that the doctors had been released and the investigation was stopped.' That was on 4 April 1953, a month after Stalin died. The censors were not allowed to have any contact with the foreign correspondents, though they had all seen my grandmother many times. As the only young woman in the department—pretty at that—she was the one designated to attend all the press conferences, posing as a Soviet correspondent. A couple of years after Stalin's death, the clerk came in with a dispatch a small envelope: 'The Italian correspondents sent this for you.' The envelope contained a ticket to the morning show of the Italian film festival. 'It was the first foreign film festival, you understand? It wasn't international, it was Italian, but it was the first Western film festival here in the USSR. I was dying to go, but there was no way to get tickets. The cinemas were swamped. You see, we had no televisions in the Soviet Union then, no refrigerators even—these came much later—we had never seenS* And there was a ticket, just a ticket with a seat number, for the morning show right after I finished work, and there was no note. It was my signal to act.' She risked her job for a film. Of course, after Stalin's death, she was risking only her job and nothing else, and after twelve years she was willing to give it up for a movie. She took precautions. She arrived at the theatre at the last minute, walked into the hall when the lights had already dimmed, and slipped out in the dark just before the end credits came up. 'I never looked to either side of me, I was so frightened. But of course they saw me.' She can still recount Fellini's La Strada in detail. She has seen it twice since and cried every time. She says it's a great film. The correspondents were endlessly fascinated with the censor's identity (for some reason they all seemed to assume that a single person read all their dispatches). They even had bets. At one point they decided the censor was a large man: he made heavy pencil marks. Researching a piece in 1997 on the fortieth anniversary of the International Youth and Students Conference in Moscow, I discover that Daniel Schorr, the patriarch of American radio commentary, served as CBS correspondent in Moscow in 1956-1957. 'You are probably too young to know this,' Schorr tells me on the telephone, 'but back then in the Soviet Union they had censorship for foreign correspondents.' I know, I say. I'm not too young and I'm the censor's granddaughter. I tell him that she is a woman, a nice old Jewish lady. I even suggest they could meet should he come to Moscow. He asks me to meet him for lunch. One of the advantages of personal journalism is that it allows one to say what one would have said when one was really at a loss for words. When we meet in a Washington, DC, restaurant about a week later, Daniel Schorr shows me the script of his commentary for National Public Radio. It compares the conversation with me to 'meeting your masked executioner'. In it I suggest that he meets my grandmother but he replies that he could not face a nice little old lady after hating the big guy for forty years. 'Tell her hello,' he says, 'and tell her the rest of the message is deleted.' I am a little nervous passing the message to my grandmother, but she laughs. You should hear Baba Ruzya laugh, the way it rings and rolls like the Russian 'r'. 'I've already called some of the guys and told them,' Daniel Schorr tells me at lunch. 'I hope you don't mind.' He is eighty-seven. Almost a year later, one of the 'guys' calls. Martin Calb, head of the media centre at Harvard, is going to Moscow, where he served in 1959, and he wants to meet my grandmother. I'm sorry, I say, she didn't censor you, she was already gone. He wants to meet her anyway. She is nervous about meeting him. Will he want to know secrets? That's not right: she did promise not to tell. Will he want to know about her? Why would he? She just talks and tells her stories until Calb and his wife have to interrupt her because a bus is taking them to a Kremlin reception. She tells me to finish telling him the story sometime, to tell him about how she left Glavlit. 'He is so handsome,' she smiles. Weeks later, I get a letter from Calb thanking me for the meeting and suggesting I apply for a fellowship at his centre. The idea that my grandmother's job as a censor could get me a fellowship at Harvard strikes me as funny, but I don't write back because I'm disorganized and basically lazy. The story of how she left Glavlit was not much of a story. After the end of the Doctors' Plot, she was finally able to join the Party. Then, after Khrushchev launched the battle against the cult of Stalin in 1956, the leadership of Glavlit changed, its ranks were purged, and she was sacked for knitting at a trade-union meeting. She had never knitted a thing in her life: someone had just been trying to teach her. In time, she began to translate books: travel and exploration, Roald Amundsen and Jacques Cousteau. Now, at seventy-eight, she makes a living translating romantic novels. She consults me about the names of car parts and sometimes on some of the raunchier terminology. What can I tell you about my other grandmother—Ester, Baba Tusya to me? First, that she was brave enough to refuse to cooperate with the secret police. Second, that she accepted a job with the secret police. Baba Tusya spent the early war years in Siberia with her mother who was exiled for 'religious propaganda' (though her mother was an atheist). For months Tusya dodged the regular attempts by a certain captain in the NKVD (the People's Committee for Internal Affairs) to draft her as an informer. The captain was, it seems, attracted to her. Perhaps this is why he did not beat her when he had her detained every few weeks. Nor did he carry out his threats to shoot her right then and there with the gun in his hand. At those times when she came close to signing, she thought of her mother—how would she look her in the eye?—and she refused. No, she did not think of what would happen to her mother if she died. She was nineteen. Then a young man, a decorated disabled war veteran, swept in, put the NKVD captain in his place, and swept Tusya away to Moscow, where she returned to university and gave birth to a son. She graduated in 1948, just as the Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign was nearing full swing. 'This was before the killer doctors, but it was already at a point that makes me sick remembering. In any case, there was no place that would hire Jews.' She made the rounds for five months. Old teachers phoned her with leads, and she followed them up with ever decreasing hope. The same scenario unfolded again and again. 'You see, I don't have the typical looks, that is, not everyone can tell right off that I'm Jewish—so the way it usually worked was that my future immediate superior would happily tell me I was hired, and then the personnel department would not let me through after I filled out the application form.' The application form included a line marked 'ethnicity' (often it still does). The jobs she did not get: a Latin teacher in a teacher's college; a cataloguer of war-trophy books at the Lenin Library; a librarian at the Library of Foreign Literature; a librarian anywhere; anything at all. Then, finally, a stroke of luck: someone called to say that the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC) was looking to hire an administrative assistant who knew Hebrew. Now the JAFC had to be the one place left in town that would still hire a Jew. And, since Hebrew had not been taught in Russia since 1917, there could not be very many potential administrative assistants. Baba Tusya had grown up in Poland, in a Zionist family, with Hebrew as her first language. 'I ran, I literally ran to this Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which was on Kropotkin Street. They tested me. I translated right off the page. I filled out an application form. They had no personnel department. They offered it to me on the spot, with a very good salary, something like 150 roubles a month. That was on a Wednesday or a Thursday, and I was to...