Author: Arnold Beichman
Publication: The Weekly Standard
Date: June 13, 2003
At long last a Pulitzer Prize committee
is looking into the possibility that the Pulitzer awarded to Walter Duranty,
the New York Times Moscow correspondent whose dispatches covered up Stalin's
infamies, might be revoked.
In order to assist in their researches,
I am downloading here some of the lies contained in those dispatches, lies
which the New York Times has never repudiated with the same splash as it
accorded Jayson Blair's comparatively trivial lies:
"There is no famine or actual starvation
nor is there likely to be."
--New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931,
page 1
"Any report of a famine in Russia
is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda."
--New York Times, August 23, 1933
"Enemies and foreign critics can
say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under
the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially
at one with the Kremlin's program, believes it worthwhile and supports
it, however hard be the sledding."
--New York Times, December 9, 1932,
page 6
"You can't make an omelet without
breaking eggs."
--New York Times, May 14, 1933,
page 18
"There is no actual starvation or
deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases
due to malnutrition."
--New York Times, March 31, 1933,
page 13
I would like to add another Duranty
quote, not in his dispatches, which is reported in a memoir by Zara Witkin,
a Los Angeles architect, who lived in the Soviet Union during the 1930s.
("An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin,
1932-1934," University of California Press ). The memoirist describes an
evening during which the Moscow correspondents were discussing how to get
out the story about the Stalin-made Russian famine. To get around the censorship,
the UP's Eugene Lyons was telephoning the dire news of the famine to his
New York office but he was ordered to stop because it was antagonizing
the Kremlin. Ralph Barnes, the New York Herald Tribune reporter, turned
to Duranty and asked him what he was going to write. Duranty replied:
Nothing. What are a few million
dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just
an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire
matter is exaggerated.
And this was at a time when peasants
in Ukraine were dying of starvation at the rate of 25,000 a day.
In his masterwork about Stalin's
imposed famine on Ukraine, "Harvest of Sorrow," Robert Conquest has written:
As one of the best known correspondents
in the world for one of the best known newspapers in the world, Mr. Duranty's
denial that there was a famine was accepted as gospel. Thus Mr. Duranty
gulled not only the readers of the New York Times but because of the newspaper's
prestige, he influenced the thinking of countless thousands of other readers
about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviet regime. And he certainly
influenced the newly-elected President Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet
Union.
What is so awful about Duranty is
that Times top brass suspected that Duranty was writing Stalinist propaganda,
but did nothing. In her exposé "Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty,
the New York Times's man in Moscow," S.J. Taylor makes it clear that Carr
Van Anda, the managing editor, Frederick T. Birchall, an assistant managing
editor, and Edwin L. James, the later managing editor, were troubled with
Duranty's Moscow reporting but did nothing about it. Birchall recommended
that Duranty be replaced but, says Taylor, "the recommendation fell by
the wayside."
When Duranty of his own volition
decided to become a special correspondent on a retainer basis for the New
York Times, the newspaper published an editorial reassuring its readers
that his reputation as "the most outstanding correspondent of an American
newspaper during all the years of his faithful and brilliant work at Moscow
will remain unimpaired in the slightest degree by the change now made."
This about a man whom Malcolm Muggeridge, the Manchester Guardian correspondent
and Duranty's contemporary, described as "the greatest liar of any journalist
I have met in fifty years of journalism."
Duranty was one of a gaggle of Stalin's
intellectual admirers. Muggeridge, whose centennial we celebrate this summer,
wrote about them in these lapidary words:
Wise old [Bernard] Shaw, high-minded
old [Henri] Barbusse, the venerable [Sidney and Beatrice] Webbs, [Andre]
Gide the pure in heart and [Pablo] Picasso the impure, down to poor little
teachers, crazed clergymen and millionaires, driveling dons and very special
correspondents like Duranty, all resolved, come what might, to believe
anything, however preposterous, to overlook nothing, however villainous,
to approve anything, however obscurantist and brutally authoritarian, in
order to be able to preserve intact the confident expectation that one
of the most thorough-going, ruthless and bloody tyrannies ever to exist
on earth could be relied on to champion human freedom, the brotherhood
of man, and all the other good liberal causes to which they had dedicated
their lives. ("Chronicles of Wasted Time," pages 275- 276.)
Let's all give a great encouraging
cheer to the Pulitzer committee for undertaking a task 70 years late. And
perhaps the Times will now a look back at the Herbert L. Matthews coverage
of Cuba and the man he so admired, Fidel Castro.
