The Press: Inside the Enigma

At a Soviet diplomatic reception in 1945, when commissars still talked to Western newsmen, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov proposed a toast to the Associated Press's Moscow chief, Eddy Gilmore. "You don't like censorship," said Molotov. "What would you say if I proposed reciprocity?" The puzzled Gilmore downed a one-gulp toast to "reciprocity" and, like Molotov, turned the glass upside down over his head to show that it was empty. With a drop or two of vodka still trickling down his nose, Molotov walked on, leaving Gilmore wondering what he meant. Next day the Russians suddenly stopped censorship of newsmen's copy. Three weeks later, just as inexplicably, they imposed it again.

Such insoluble riddles were merely daily routine for Correspondent Gilmore during the twelve years he covered Moscow for the A.P. Now back in the U.S., with his Russian ex-ballerina wife and their two children, 46-year-old Eddy Gilmore last week told some of the stories he could not write in Russia.

A Recipe. From the start of the cold war, censorship was always ironhanded, often mysterious. In 1947, when Gilmore filed a light feature story on how Russian housewives cook shashlik and beef Stroganoff, the censor deleted everything in the story except the recipe, apparently because he thought the discussion of Russian eating habits was intended to make them look barbaric. Newsmen never set eyes on the censors or knew who they were. They simply took three copies of every story to entrance No. 10 at the Moscow Central Telegraph Office. If the story cleared quickly, newsmen got it back in as little as 20 minutes, censored and stamped. Any but the most routine stories took hours or days; many a story just disappeared.

On fast-breaking news, correspondents often telephoned London at the same time that they cabled their censored dispatches. If they strayed a single word from the censored text, the telephone line always went abruptly dead. To warn deskmen in A.P.'s London bureau, Gilmore sometimes wrote at the end of a dispatch, "Please give this a careful reading; I had to write it in a hurry," which they knew meant "The censor's been hacking at this one; watch it closely."

The only kind of story that correspondents knew they could usually clear through censorship without a hitch was one taken directly from the Russian press. But even then, the censor would sometimes delete "Pravda says," making it sound like the correspondent's own opinion. Every phone the newsmen could use was tapped; there was always loud clicking on the line. Two English-speaking A. P. secretaries were mysteriously hauled off to jail and oblivion. In addition, correspondents were never given even elementary information by the Russians. "If they announced a new appointment," says Gilmore, "and you didn't have your own personal file on the guy, you couldn't even get anyone to tell you his middle name."