The arrest of Evan Gershkovich confirms that the pendulum of history has abruptly swung for Moscow correspondents, back to the dark days of the early post-Stalinist years, when the censorship of their daily work and the obsessive control of their lives private life made them permanent hostages of the regime.
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The censor raged behind an opaque pane of glass in the Central Telegraph Office.
If we are to believe the testimonies of the first correspondents of the Western press in the Soviet Union during the second half of the 1950s, they could barely make out their hands in the slot through which they delivered their typed articles.
After a trying wait, which sometimes exceeded the closing time of the editorial office, they recovered their writings, from which had been deleted all the passages considered as denigrating “
realized socialism
” in the Land of the Soviets.
And if, at the time of dictation in the telephone booth, one of them...
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