Specifically their sustained reproduction of pro-communist revolutionary articles as part of their regular 1917 Louis Project
“When I was a kid in Moscow, my grandmother told me that New York was the greatest city in the world, The New York Times was the greatest newspaper in the world, and Harrison Salisbury was its greatest journalist.”
M. Gessen’s grandmother never met Salisbury, but for several years, she read almost every article he wrote. She remembered an article of his that she felt was the first to accurately depict the reality she and her circle of friends — young Jewish intellectuals in Moscow — had been living in as the Soviet government waged a campaign to identify and imprison “rootless cosmopolitans,” code for “Jews.”
Gesson’s grandmother was also “the person whose job, at the Chief Directorate of Literature and Publishing, was to keep much of his work from ever being published.” Gesson writes about Salisbury in a new piece for the The New York Times, part of the series marking 175 years of eyewitness journalism, “He Was The Times’s Moscow Chief. My Grandmother Was His Censor.”