1930s AD

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

Yet, even half-a-century later, Duranty's newspaper still was not ready to expose the nature of Stalin's big lie. In the 1986 book review the Times sent Insight conceding that, yes, there was a famine because of Stalin's collective agriculture policies, and maybe Duranty actively covered it up, the reviewer still argued against the view of Conquest and almost every other professional historian that Stalin deliberately was trying to kill off the Ukraine's small farmers. "Far more debatable is the thesis that the famine was specifically aimed as an instrument of genocide against the Ukraine," reviewer Whitney wrote, criticizing Conquest for tangential use of a book published by Ukrainian emigres as a source.

In 1988 the bipartisan Congressional Commission on the Ukraine Famine would vindicate Conquest, using the word "genocide" (which Conquest actually did not use, calling it a "terror famine") to describe the policy of deliberately killing off the Ukrainian kulaks. A joint resolution from both houses of the U.S. Congress ratified the commission's conclusion, and in 2003 a House bill to establish a memorial to the victims referred to the deliberate starvation as "the famine-genocide in the Ukraine." This bill was cosponsored, among others, by Democratic Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, and Nita Lowey of New York all devoutly on the political left. Evidence that Stalin's collectivization policies were intended to wipe out all the Ukraine's traditional small farmers includes the facts that the Soviet government confiscated nearly all food from a bumper Ukrainian crop, turned down aid from international relief organizations and refused to let the Ukrainian peasants flee to obtain food.

"The Ukrainians were nationally conscious, and they understood what freedom means," Sawkiw explains. "For them to give up their land for this collectivization campaign meant that they had to give up a part of themselves, meant that they were giving up a part of their being as a nation. So they were very nationally conscious, and that's why Stalin specifically targeted the [Ukrainian] peasants" to be starved to death.

Ironically, even as the Times continues to downplay the horrors of the Ukrainian famine in which so many millions were killed, its representatives argue that it doesn't matter because Duranty's Pulitzer was awarded for stories published in 1931, before they say the famine was noticeable. "Duranty's prize was given for a specific set of stories in 1931, not in 1932 or 1933 when the famine in Ukraine struck with full force," the Times e-mail states. In letters and statements, Pulitzer administrator Gissler has taken a similar line. Yet in a Times column the paper sent with the e-mail, author Karl E. Meyer states, "The biggest Duranty lapse was his indifference to the catastrophic famine in 1930-31 [italics added]." The evidence in Stalin's Apologist, published by the prestigious Oxford University Press, and other authoritative accounts, shows Duranty toed the communist line from the moment the Times assigned him to the Soviet Union in 1921. In one of his first stories for that year, about the infamous New Economic Policy to get the West to build the communist economy, Duranty gushed that "[Vladimir] Lenin has thrown communism overboard ... abandoning state ownership, with the exception of a definite number of great industries of national importance such as were controlled by the state in France, England and Germany during the war [World War I]."