1930s AD

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 22, 2003

The newspaper makes much of the fact that in 1986 it gave a largely favorable review to Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow, which depicted the horrors of the Stalin-engineered Ukrainian famine that killed more than 7 million people in the 1930s and criticized Duranty's reporting for covering it up in the United States. Citing Duranty, Times reviewer Craig Whitney euphemized that "poor performance by some Western correspondents helped Stalin spread the lie."

Yet, as Conquest notes in his book, just three years earlier the 1983 annual report of the New York Times Co. listed, along with other honors of which the Times is proud, Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer Prize for "dispassionate, interpretive reporting of the news from Russia." Conquest, himself a Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, also points out that many other newspapers and journalists got the story right at the time. "In spite of everything, full or adequate reports appeared in the [British papers] the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Telegraph; [the French papers] Le Matin and Le Figaro; [the Swiss papers] the Neue Zuericher Zeitung and the Gazette de Lausanne; La Stampa in Italy, the Reichpost in Austria and scores of other Western papers," he writes. "In the United States, wide-circulation newspapers printed very full firsthand accounts by Ukrainian-American and other visitors (though these were discounted as, often, appearing in 'right-wing' journals); and the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Herald Tribune (and the New York Jewish Forwaerts) gave broad coverage." The now-defunct Chicago American even ran pictures of the pale, skeletal Ukrainian children and the fields littered with corpses.

And Duranty's reporting was filled with more than just "defects," the phrase in the Times' 2003 apologies. It contained information that, by several accounts, he knew to be false. The Soviets did keep tight control over foreign journalists, but Duranty offered Stalin his eager cooperation. In 1933, at the height of the famine, Duranty wrote that "village markets [were] flowing with eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk and butter. ... A child can see this is not famine but abundance." Reports such as these were crucial, historians say, in the decision of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to grant the Soviet Union diplomatic recognition in 1933. But a British Embassy dispatch from 1933, reported in Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow and then in S.J. Taylor's definitive 1990 Duranty biography, Stalin's Apologist, quotes Duranty as admitting to British Embassy officials in Moscow that "the Ukraine had been bled white [and] the peasants were 'double-crossed' by the government." In his words, it was "quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year."

Little wonder Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the courageous left-wing journalists who reported the truth about the famine and who later became a famous author, editor, humorist and playwright, called Duranty "the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism."