I will read anything M. Gessen writes. Their stories about Russia and totalitarianism are thoughtful and nuanced, drawing from their own experience living there. If you haven't read any of their books, I don't think there is a bad one in the bunch.

Here they write about their grandmother who worked as a Soviet government censor in Moscow, one of the people whose job was to strike out or kill dispatches filed by foreign correspondents at the Central Telegraph office. From 1949 to 1954, one of the reporters she censored most was Harrison Salisbury, The New York Times's Moscow correspondent, whose copy she cut of specifics, analysis, and humor under strict rules against comparisons or mention of the censorship itself. She killed his story on the Soviet Union quietly reinstating the death penalty, and later his dispatches on the antisemitic "Doctors' Plot," which she recognized as accurate because she was living the same fear as a Jewish intellectual in Moscow. Salisbury spent years asking the Times to disclose that his reporting passed through censorship to no avail.

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