Nick Daniloff was my interlocutor between one semester at BU's graduate program in screenwriting and transferring to MA journalism @ NU.
He was a very interesting man who had led a very interesting life. At the time, 2000, I remembered his detainment in the Soviet Union, and we discussed this, as well as the advent of Putin. Like his wife Ruth, he saw through Putin as a "thug" from the beginning, noting his KGB career.
I never met Ruth Daniloff, but she seems like a special person,
M.
Ruth Daniloff held her daughter, Miranda, while walking through Moscow's Red Square with her husband, journalist Nicholas Daniloff, in 1964 near St. Basil's Cathedral.DANILOFF FAMILY
When the KGB arrested her journalist husband in 1986 on false accusations of spying, Ruth Daniloff was the lynchpin in efforts to secure his release from a Moscow prison — an essential go-between for US diplomats and reporters who collectively pressured Soviet authorities.
“The only time I feel fatigue is in the evenings,” she told The Washington Post in the couple’s Moscow apartment that September while Nicholas Daniloff, then a US News & World Report correspondent, was being held in Lefortovo Prison. “That’s when I get a little panicky, even paranoid. But I can see the cycles happen, and I know that by morning it will pass.”
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“An in-your-face attitude rules Grozny these days,” she wrote in a 2007 Globe article that The New York Times republished. “It is as though the city is telling the Kremlin: OK, you won the war. You killed 15 percent of our population and dispatched us across the world as refugees. You can still arrest us arbitrarily. But you cannot kill our spirit.”
An author of books and articles who could wring wry observations from moving into assisted living or being struck by a bicyclist while crossing a Cambridge street, Mrs. Daniloff was 88 and her health was failing when she went to sleep Friday in her Cambridge residence and didn’t reawaken.
“He could have languished in jail forever, but Ruth was a relentless dynamo,” said Marvin Kalb, a former news correspondent for NBC and CBS who first met the Daniloffs when they were foreign correspondents together in Moscow in 1961. “She was on the phone with reporters, she was pressing her story.”
Nicholas recalled that his wife “was not one to stay quiet. The American embassy said, ‘Don’t say anything. We’ll handle it quietly and everything will work out.’ Well, Ruth wasn’t going to put up with that. She wanted to shout from the rooftops and she was going to remind the world about it all the time, which she did.”
In her 1986 Post interview, while Nicholas was imprisoned, Mrs. Daniloff smiled while recalling comments she had made to her husband’s Soviet interrogators.
“I get very angry,” she said, “although I try to stay civil.”
Mrs. Daniloff “was a bureaucracy buster. She just could not stand it and had no problem cutting through it,” said her daughter, Miranda Daniloff Mancusi of Brookline.
Years earlier, when the Daniloffs were first in Moscow during Nicholas’s years as a United Press International correspondent, Mrs. Daniloff quickly distinguished herself for her perceptive assessments.
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“Her instincts on Russian people, how she read the mind of the Russian people was extraordinary,” said Kalb, who in later years was the founding director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
At a time in Moscow when “you could meet somebody, but you didn’t know if you were making a friend or you were meeting a Russian spy,” Kalb said, “everything was so uncertain, and she was a rock of certainty in the midst of chaos.”
By 1986, when the KGB arrested Nicholas, Kalb was hosting NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He was among many who counted on Mrs. Daniloff to get details to US journalists, who then informed the American public.
“She really demonstrated strength, good sense, and absolute determination,” Kalb said, and that was true of her writing as well. “She wrote so beautifully. She really knew how to use the language.”
The older of two sisters, Ruth Dunn was born on Dec. 3, 1935, in Ludham, a village in Norfolk, England.
Her father, Raymond Dunn, a sailor, died of cancer when she was a teenager. Her mother, Mary Frances Chambers Dunn, then brought the girls to Oxford, where she had attended college. She was an “English woman who wrote poetry and believed in ghosts,” Mrs. Daniloff later wrote.
Aside from auditing university classes, Mrs. Daniloff’s formal education ended after high school. She initially worked in an Oxford shop selling rare books.
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“She was self-taught, so intelligent, and curious about everything around her,” Miranda said.
“She was a very free thinker,” said Mrs. Daniloff’s son, Caleb, of Cambridge. “She was this presence, this force of nature. The way I’ve always described it is that her engine was always running.”
In the late 1950s, Ruth Dunn met Nicholas Daniloff, a student at Magdalen College, a constituent of Oxford University. Traveling from London to Oxford one day, he decided to “meet the most interesting young woman on the train, which in fact I did.”
They married in 1961 in Geneva, Switzerland, and soon were in Moscow for the first time. Over the years his work brought them to Washington, D.C.; to Cambridge while he was a Nieman fellow at Harvard; and back to Moscow, before they divided their time for decades between Cambridge and a home in Andover, Vt.
“We looked at the world pretty much through the same set of glasses,” said Nicholas, who added that he had “pushed and encouraged her to write, and it turned out that she had a very special view of the world.”
And her perceptiveness helped her sense someone’s true nature sooner than others did, Kalb recalled.
When Vladimir Putin rose to power in Russia and some in the United States were optimistic about how he would act on the world stage, “Ruth saw through him from the very beginning,” Kalb said. “She spotted the dictator in Putin well before others who fancy themselves Russian specialists.”
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In addition to her husband, daughter, and son, Mrs. Daniloff leaves her sister, Primrose Frances Roberts of Oxford, England; five grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
A celebration of her life and work will be announced.
One day while tending her Cambridge garden in 1998, NPR’s news of foreign dictators and despair wafted out the kitchen window.
“I went into the house and switched off the radio,” Mrs. Daniloff wrote for the Globe. “I had overdosed on stories of human atrocities during recent travels to Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, and southern Russia.”
Yet gardens, she wrote, sometimes reflected the world’s woes. Invasive plants “rejected resettlement,” and wild pansies were destined for destruction.
“As I toss the pansies into their mass grave on the compost heap, I feel a stab of guilt,” she wrote, and years later she used that same arched-eyebrow humor to assess her new home in an assisted living center near Harvard Square, when her knees no longer tolerated stairs.
Amid the isolation of the pandemic lockdown, she wrote in a separate essay, residents fell into discussions of their cats and dogs, “who are more interesting than what is taking place in the White House these days.”
An insightful mind, Mrs. Daniloff noted, is beneficial no matter where you are.
“Some people cringe when they hear me refer to our assisted living residence as ‘God’s Waiting Room,’” she wrote. “I would argue that we are all in God’s waiting room from the day we are born. It all depends what we make of it.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at [email protected].
He was a very interesting man who had led a very interesting life. At the time, 2000, I remembered his detainment in the Soviet Union, and we discussed this, as well as the advent of Putin. Like his wife Ruth, he saw through Putin as a "thug" from the beginning, noting his KGB career.
I never met Ruth Daniloff, but she seems like a special person,
M.
Ruth Daniloff, writer who led efforts to free her husband from a Moscow prison, dies at 88
By Bryan Marquard Globe Staff,Updated January 24, 2024, 2 hours ago
When the KGB arrested her journalist husband in 1986 on false accusations of spying, Ruth Daniloff was the lynchpin in efforts to secure his release from a Moscow prison — an essential go-between for US diplomats and reporters who collectively pressured Soviet authorities.
“The only time I feel fatigue is in the evenings,” she told The Washington Post in the couple’s Moscow apartment that September while Nicholas Daniloff, then a US News & World Report correspondent, was being held in Lefortovo Prison. “That’s when I get a little panicky, even paranoid. But I can see the cycles happen, and I know that by morning it will pass.”
Advertisement
Get Today's Headlines
The day's top stories delivered every morning.
Enter Email
Sign Up
“An in-your-face attitude rules Grozny these days,” she wrote in a 2007 Globe article that The New York Times republished. “It is as though the city is telling the Kremlin: OK, you won the war. You killed 15 percent of our population and dispatched us across the world as refugees. You can still arrest us arbitrarily. But you cannot kill our spirit.”
An author of books and articles who could wring wry observations from moving into assisted living or being struck by a bicyclist while crossing a Cambridge street, Mrs. Daniloff was 88 and her health was failing when she went to sleep Friday in her Cambridge residence and didn’t reawaken.
“He could have languished in jail forever, but Ruth was a relentless dynamo,” said Marvin Kalb, a former news correspondent for NBC and CBS who first met the Daniloffs when they were foreign correspondents together in Moscow in 1961. “She was on the phone with reporters, she was pressing her story.”
Nicholas recalled that his wife “was not one to stay quiet. The American embassy said, ‘Don’t say anything. We’ll handle it quietly and everything will work out.’ Well, Ruth wasn’t going to put up with that. She wanted to shout from the rooftops and she was going to remind the world about it all the time, which she did.”
In her 1986 Post interview, while Nicholas was imprisoned, Mrs. Daniloff smiled while recalling comments she had made to her husband’s Soviet interrogators.
“I get very angry,” she said, “although I try to stay civil.”
Mrs. Daniloff “was a bureaucracy buster. She just could not stand it and had no problem cutting through it,” said her daughter, Miranda Daniloff Mancusi of Brookline.
Years earlier, when the Daniloffs were first in Moscow during Nicholas’s years as a United Press International correspondent, Mrs. Daniloff quickly distinguished herself for her perceptive assessments.
Advertisement
“Her instincts on Russian people, how she read the mind of the Russian people was extraordinary,” said Kalb, who in later years was the founding director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
At a time in Moscow when “you could meet somebody, but you didn’t know if you were making a friend or you were meeting a Russian spy,” Kalb said, “everything was so uncertain, and she was a rock of certainty in the midst of chaos.”
By 1986, when the KGB arrested Nicholas, Kalb was hosting NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He was among many who counted on Mrs. Daniloff to get details to US journalists, who then informed the American public.
“She really demonstrated strength, good sense, and absolute determination,” Kalb said, and that was true of her writing as well. “She wrote so beautifully. She really knew how to use the language.”
The older of two sisters, Ruth Dunn was born on Dec. 3, 1935, in Ludham, a village in Norfolk, England.
Her father, Raymond Dunn, a sailor, died of cancer when she was a teenager. Her mother, Mary Frances Chambers Dunn, then brought the girls to Oxford, where she had attended college. She was an “English woman who wrote poetry and believed in ghosts,” Mrs. Daniloff later wrote.
Aside from auditing university classes, Mrs. Daniloff’s formal education ended after high school. She initially worked in an Oxford shop selling rare books.
Advertisement
“She was self-taught, so intelligent, and curious about everything around her,” Miranda said.
“She was a very free thinker,” said Mrs. Daniloff’s son, Caleb, of Cambridge. “She was this presence, this force of nature. The way I’ve always described it is that her engine was always running.”
In the late 1950s, Ruth Dunn met Nicholas Daniloff, a student at Magdalen College, a constituent of Oxford University. Traveling from London to Oxford one day, he decided to “meet the most interesting young woman on the train, which in fact I did.”
They married in 1961 in Geneva, Switzerland, and soon were in Moscow for the first time. Over the years his work brought them to Washington, D.C.; to Cambridge while he was a Nieman fellow at Harvard; and back to Moscow, before they divided their time for decades between Cambridge and a home in Andover, Vt.
“We looked at the world pretty much through the same set of glasses,” said Nicholas, who added that he had “pushed and encouraged her to write, and it turned out that she had a very special view of the world.”
And her perceptiveness helped her sense someone’s true nature sooner than others did, Kalb recalled.
When Vladimir Putin rose to power in Russia and some in the United States were optimistic about how he would act on the world stage, “Ruth saw through him from the very beginning,” Kalb said. “She spotted the dictator in Putin well before others who fancy themselves Russian specialists.”
Advertisement
In addition to her husband, daughter, and son, Mrs. Daniloff leaves her sister, Primrose Frances Roberts of Oxford, England; five grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
A celebration of her life and work will be announced.
One day while tending her Cambridge garden in 1998, NPR’s news of foreign dictators and despair wafted out the kitchen window.
“I went into the house and switched off the radio,” Mrs. Daniloff wrote for the Globe. “I had overdosed on stories of human atrocities during recent travels to Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, and southern Russia.”
Yet gardens, she wrote, sometimes reflected the world’s woes. Invasive plants “rejected resettlement,” and wild pansies were destined for destruction.
“As I toss the pansies into their mass grave on the compost heap, I feel a stab of guilt,” she wrote, and years later she used that same arched-eyebrow humor to assess her new home in an assisted living center near Harvard Square, when her knees no longer tolerated stairs.
Amid the isolation of the pandemic lockdown, she wrote in a separate essay, residents fell into discussions of their cats and dogs, “who are more interesting than what is taking place in the White House these days.”
An insightful mind, Mrs. Daniloff noted, is beneficial no matter where you are.
“Some people cringe when they hear me refer to our assisted living residence as ‘God’s Waiting Room,’” she wrote. “I would argue that we are all in God’s waiting room from the day we are born. It all depends what we make of it.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at [email protected].
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