Ukrainians want pro-Stalin writer stripped of Pulitzer

The Observer ^ | May 4, 2003 | Askold Krushelnycky

[MadIvan]

Drug addict, sexual predator on both sexes and apologist for Stalin, British reporter Walter Duranty still managed to win America's most coveted award for journalism, the Pulitzer prize, for his coverage of Soviet life in the Thirties.

Now a campaign has been launched to strip him posthumously of the award by Ukrainians, who insist that Duranty, who was born in Britain and worked for the New York Times, helped Stalin to cover up an extermination campaign that claimed millions of lives, mostly in Ukraine.

Ukrainian politicians and academics and Ukrainian communities in Britain, Canada, the US and Australia have started to bombard the Pulitzer offices with postcards demanding that the award be revoked. The campaign was timed to begin this month because it is the seventieth anniversary of the high point of an artificial famine engineered by Stalin's regime which, by some accounts, cost more than 10 million lives.

The famine was part of a war against peasant farmers, loathed by Stalin because they were hostile to communism. Stalin also regarded the Ukrainian peasantry as the cradle for nationalist tendencies aimed at breaking Ukraine away from the Soviet Union.

In 1932 and 1933 Stalin imposed crippling demands on peasants for grain and other foodstuffs, which were extracted by brute force and executions. By the spring of 1933, people in Ukraine were reduced to eating grass, tree bark, earthworms and anything else they could find. There were hundreds of cases of cannibalism in a country with some of the world's most fertile farmland, and at its climax an estimated 25,000 people were starving to death each day.

Duranty was a correspondent in Moscow while the famine raged and he knew it was happening. He not only turned a blind eye, but vilified the few Western journalists who did report on it, branding their dispatches as anti-Soviet lies.

Born in Britain in 1884 into a well-to-do family, he studied languages at Cambridge. In the Twenties he lived in Paris, where he developed an opium habit and took part in drunken orgies with both men and women.

During his time in Paris he married and began writing reports for the New York Times. His clever and well-crafted articles won him a job as the newspaper's Moscow correspondent. There is no evidence that Duranty particularly sympathised with communism, but he wrote glowing reports about the Soviet Union because he wanted to gain access to top officials.

He succeeded in doing that spectacularly by securing the first interview for an American newspaper with Stalin himself, who Duranty described as 'the greatest living statesman'. He became the Soviet regime's favourite correspondent, always presenting the Soviet Union in a positive light, and in 1932 he won the Pulitzer prize for a series of articles about the Soviet economy.

When stories about the famine began to surface in Moscow, Duranty dismissed them as 'exaggerated or malignant propaganda', and in one report employed the phrase 'you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs'. However, British Foreign Office documents show that Duranty confided to a diplomat at the British Embassy in Moscow that he believed around 10 million people had perished.

Malcolm Muggeridge, then the Manchester Guardian 's Moscow correspondent, travelled secretly and at great risk to Ukraine. He was appalled at the scenes of mass starvation and heaps of dead bodies that he witnessed and described them in his reports. Duranty attacked Muggeridge and debunked his reports. Duranty was 'the greatest liar of any journalist I have ever met', retorted Muggeridge.

Historian Robert Conquest told The Observer that Duranty played an important role in covering up the famine and 'he should be exposed again and again and again'. Conquest believes the Soviet secret police may have been blackmailing Duranty over his sexual behaviour.

Sig Gissler of the Pulitzer Board said that the prize was given for a story unconnected with the famine. The Pulitzer board has only once before revoked a prize, when in 1981 Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke's story about an eight-year-old ghetto boy she claimed was already a heroin addict turned out to be a fabrication.

[MadIvan]

He should be stripped. However this is informative about the "great reporting tradition" down at the New York Times. Shocking that this is in the Observer.

Regards, Ivan

[MadIvan]

Bump!

[BenLurkin]

bttt

[Burkeman1]

The New York Times won't back this. If they did- it would unleash a torrent of other reporters who were in the pay or service of the Soviet Regime.

[annyokie]

"When stories about the famine began to surface in Moscow, Duranty dismissed them as 'exaggerated or malignant propaganda', and in one report employed the phrase 'you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs'. However, British Foreign Office documents show that Duranty confided to a diplomat at the British Embassy in Moscow that he believed around 10 million people had perished. "

Nothing's changed at the Grey Lady since the 1930's, I see.

[Cicero]

The New York Times used to run a full-page ad every year celebrating all the Pulitzer Prizes they had won. Walter Duranty was their first reporter to win the prize, so each year he appeared at the head of the list.

I haven't subscribed to the Times for some time now, so I don't know if they still include Duranty in this annual ad. But they did for many years, long after it was known that he was instrumental in covering up one of Stalin's worst atrocities.

[daddypatriot]

The New York Times has always been consistent in one area: its editors never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Also, the Times editors will print anything that they believe will earn a Pulitzer Prize. I am a retired newspaper reporter who made it a policy to never enter writing contests because of a long-held conviction that they are always rigged. By the way, I read Robert Conquest's wonderful book, "Harvest of Sorrow", which exposes Duranty's lies.

[headsonpikes]

Wonderful news!

Never stop fighting those lying commie b*stards!

[gcruse]

Isn't he credited with the phrase, following an initial visit to the USSR, "I have seen the future, and it works"?

[Bedford Forrest]

"Born in Britain in 1884 into a well-to-do family, he studied languages at Cambridge. In the Twenties he lived in Paris, where he developed an opium habit and took part in drunken orgies with both men and women."

Bung piracy is a long standing tradition at the NY Slimes, it's a Yale/Cambridge/Oxfag sort of thing, dontcha know. Makes their hirelings very malleable in the hands of the Russkies and other such thugs. But this curious propensity among many of the NY Slimesmen has had some very real and unfortunate effects, over the years. To put it most succinctly, thank the Lord for the internet.

[friendly]

MEGA-BUMP

My heart-felt thanks to the justice-starved Ukrainians. This has upset me for years.

It is time to once and for all utterly crush the evil New York Times.

[friendly]

By the way, Duranty is very much alive today.

You can find him in the CNN, AP, Reuters and NY Times offices in Havana.

And, before the recent unpleasantness, also lounging in Bagdad, sipping their drinks in luxurious surroundings.

[pragmatic_asian]

"The famine was part of a war against peasant farmers, loathed by Stalin because they were hostile to communism."

But, but how could farmers hate communism, the worker's paradise?

[Grampa Dave]

For over 7 decades, Drug addicts, sexual predators on both sexes and apologists for Stalin, Castro, Mao, Saddomite, Assad and the murdering mullahs of Iran have controlled what has been printed in the NY Slimes.

For over 7 decades, the NY Slimes's Drug addicts, sexual predators on both sexes and apologists for Stalin, Castro, Mao, Saddomite, Assad and the murdering mullahs of Iran, have resulted in the mass murder, rape and imprisonment of millions of innocents.

[tet68]

They just hated successful farmers, the ones that were smart enough or worked hard enough to own a horse or cow, or to build their own house. Known as Kurkuls or kulaks these were driven off their lands into captivity or starved to force the others into the communal farming system.
In Ukraine, this was done to destroy any vestige of Ukranian nationalism.
Along with grain confiscation , the peasants were left with nothing to eat and nothing to plant in the spring after starving all winter.
Red Brigades made up of dedicated Komsomol members confiscated foodstuffs,animals, or any family savings often
leading to death by starvation, or cannibilism.
The hatred of the Communists was such that they even killed
the song birds in the area so the Ukrainians would not know
that spring had arrived.
Duranty knew all about this.

[dighton]

Isn't he credited with the phrase, following an initial visit to the USSR, "I have seen the future, and it works"?

That was John Reed.

[henderson field]

If they'd had guns, it would have been different. Live free or die.

[gcruse]

Doink. Ok. Now I 'member.

[T'wit]

After Duranty, let's revisit the sleazy Herbert L. Matthews, whose New York Slimes stories were shameless public relations for Fidel Castro.

[MEG33]

Good point...the fellow travellers.