Yanks for Stalin
Interview Transcript

Anna Stepanova  (cont)

A.  Generally speaking, we have a multi-ethnic city.  I can't remember anybody treating foreigners or people of other ethnicities badly.

Q.  How did the Americans feel here?

A.  I was surprised that they came to this hungry chaos.  Either they were romantics seeking adventure, or their job skills and knowledge weren't in demand at home.  Perhaps they wanted to help us.  After all, everyone knew how difficult things were here.  I think that everyone here treated them well.  Even the Tartars were treated well.  It was forbidden to call them Tartars, only "nationals."  There was a section of the local paper written in the Tartar language, they had their own social circles.  In the Palace of Culture they had their own--

Q.  Okay.  Were you allowed to socialize with Americans and the Germans?  It was then that the authorities began to mistrust foreigners.

A.  I don't know.  If the question concerned wartime, I would be able to say.

Q.  When did censorship begin, and in what ways did it manifest itself?

A.  Strict censorship began with the war, and raged throughout the postwar years, that is, the 1950s, 60s and 70s. 

Q.  How did it manifest itself?

A.  It was difficult to work.  They crossed out all the information from news reports.  For example, it was forbidden to write the word Izumrut, the name of a nearby village.  Malishevo was also a forbidden word.  It was forbidden to publish the production figures of Uralasbest.  Everything was a military secret.  Everything was forbidden, everything was written in a roundabout way.  It was offensive:  you write, you try so hard, you find information, and later the censor crosses it out.  This was too common.  There was a list that was distributed across the Soviet Union, detailing what was allowed and what wasn't.  The censor in our editing office worked according to this list.  By the way, the censor was an illiterate woman with a fifth-grade education.  She knew the list very well, and never wavered.  I remember how she crossed out the word "officer" from one article, although there was no military base in our city.  Later, one of our staff, the late Rustam Alexandrovich Kultin, wrote a poem about the censor in which he claimed that it wasn't an officer sitting in the Military Commissariat, but William Shakespeare.  It interfered with our work.

Q.  Do you remember the poems of the 1930s?  Or songs?

A.  Of course.

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