![]() He would fill his dispatches with reasonable and not-so-reasonable guesses on policy and would treat the censorship process as a sort of interview: whatever was cleared for dispatch, was confirmed. ![]() Salisbury was even more inventive than my grandmother realized: after a while he devised a system for fleshing out his reporting. She loved Salisbury’s stories because they gave her something to read, and a lot of work: whenever she encountered a passage that had not been lifted directly from a Soviet newspaper, she translated it into Russian and called it in to Stalin’s secretary: decisions on what would be cut and what would be transmitted were made in the Kremlin. She was never allowed to have direct contact with correspondents, but they loomed large in her imagination, and she in theirs. My grandmother worked as the censor for foreign correspondents stationed in Moscow. The only exception was, she said, The New York Times’ Harrison Salisbury, who seemed to find sources and stories outside Pravda. The problem with “Walter Cronkite and the rest of them,” the American correspondents in Moscow, my grandmother used to tell me, was that all they ever did was regurgitate the Soviet media. Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, Russia, 2013 ![]()
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