In five years as a Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, Harrison Salisbury has worked under a double handicap. In Moscow Russian censors never passed a word of his copy that did not fit the Communist line; in New York the Times usually ran Salisbury's dispatches with no warning that the stories had been passed by the world's most ironhanded censorship. As a result, his reports often read more like Red propaganda than accounts of what was really going on inside Russia. Salisbury himself was even accused of being pro-Soviet or a fellow traveler.
Last week, back in Manhattan at his own request for reassignment to the Times's city staff, Salisbury was able to answer his critics by writing "for the first time . . without the restrictions of censorship or the fear of it." His 14-part series was not only a well-written, fresh, firsthand report on Russian Communism. It also vividly demonstrated how misleading many of his censored Times stories were. (Wailed Manhattan's Communist Daily Worker: "Why did Salisbury write one thing from Moscow and the opposite from New York?") Explained Salisbury: "[This is] the real story, not the emasculated one that was all that fearful censors permitted correspondents to cable."
Wit & Charm. Since Stalin's death, wrote Salisbury, Communist Russia has undergone a complete "new look" as drastic as any change in its whole history. In the face of domestic turmoil the new leaders of Russia have abandoned "Stalin's bludgeon for more graceful tactics." Russia is now ruled not by a single dictator but by a group or junta. In comparison to Stalin ("Georgian suspicions, a mountaineer's narrow hatreds . . . the midnight habits of a proscribed revolutionary, the wolflike morals of a hunted bank robber") Salisbury found the junta composed of an outwardly pleasant bunch of men who thus, as a Western diplomat said, "are more dangerous than Stalin."
The junta consists of Premier Georgy Malenkov ("full of old-fashioned grace"), Nikita Khrushchev ("hail fellow well met"), Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov ("quiet, patient and reasonable"), Lazar Kaganovich ("likes his liquor"), N. A. Bulganin ("handsome and witty"), A. I. Mikoyan ("probably the sharpest and cleverest of all"). All are about the same height (5 ft. 4 in.), and all have the common secondary goal of convincing their own people and the West that the "Stalin terror" is over. But Salisbury emphasizes that the change is only on the surface; their primary goal remains the same: worldwide Communist dictatorship.