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.

[MEG33]

Now that's a reach too far!

[amused]

Now that's a reach too far!

Sometimes you read this stuff and you need a leftist to English dictionary. ;-)

[martianagent]

I'm sure you're aware of the story of Pavlik Morozov, the peasant kid who turned in his father and other villagers for trying to keep enough food so as not to starve and was himself killed by his grandfather with an axe. Pavlik became a hero of the CCCP with pioneer and comsomol lagers and what not named after him. A thoroughly perverted system.

[jodorowsky]

Gareth Jones website

Wow... that is going to be a fun read. I'd never heard of him either. Thanks!

[jodorowsky]

I like Burroughs' take on the incident...

Fifty years ago, deep in the Ural mountains of Lower Slobbovia, a thirteen-year old prick named Pavlik Morozov denounce his father to the local authorities as a counter-revolutionary kulak because he had a pig hidden in his basement. (A kulak is a subsistence farmer.) That was when Stalin was starving out the kulaks to make way for collective farms, which didn't work. Stalin levied an outrageous produce tax, knowing that the farmers would hide their crops, then sent out patrols to search and seize concealed produce and farm animals. At least three million people starved to death in the winters of 1932 and 1933, and that's a conservative estimate.

Little Pavliki was hacked to stroganoff by the outraged neighbors -- good job and all. Thus perish all talking a******s.

"His name must not die!" sobbed Maxim Gorky, his hearty voice contracted by painful emotion. So Pavliki became a folk hero. Got a street in Moscow named after him, and a statue to commemorate his heroic act. He should have been sculpted with the head of a rat. And the viilage of Gerasimovka is a f*****g shrine, drawing legions of youthful pilgrims to the home of Pavlik Morozov.

"Dirty little Stukach."

That's Ruski for "rat" -- a word designed to be spat out.

[DPB101]

Good Burroughs quote. Another from a letter he wrote to Jack Kerouac in 1950:

"I fear the U.S. is headed for socialism, which means, of course, ever increasing interference in the business of each citizen. Whatever happened to the glorious frontier, of minding one's own business? The word liberal has come to stand for the most damnable tyranny, a snivelling, mealymouthed tyranny of bureaucrats, social workers, psychologists and union officials. The world of 1984 is not even 30 years away."

Wonder if anyone has heard of Gareth Jones?. He died young but was a prolific writer. I've read most of the anticommunist books and can't recall ever hearing the name.

[Temple Owl]

The overwhelming number of Pulitzer Prizes went to left-wing liberals. That's because the board, which decides who gets them, is composed of left-wing liberals--many are communists.

[jodorowsky]

I saw your link to Gareth Jones via a later post -- thanks a lot!

I collect English-language pro-Soviet stuff from the 30s and prior. (That has a different sort of appeal from the likes of Jones.)

One day I am going to web my collection of English language apologetics for the 5 Year Plans.

I have this excellent children's primer on the plan, that was a Book of the Month in 1931! ("New Russia's Primer"). Professor George S. Counts of Columbia wrote the introduction to this translation. Upon reading this book, says Prof Counts, the American teacher will

be forced to put to himself the question: Can we not in some way harness the school to the task of building a better, a more just, a more beautiful society? Can we not broaden the sentimnt of patriotism to embrace the struggles which men must ever wage with ignorance, disease, poverty, ugliness, injustice? This means that we shall have to turn our attention increasingly from the mechanics of school procedure to the fundamental problems of American life and culture."

Columbia.

I am also a great fan of Pat Sloan, author of "Russia Without Illusions", a hilariously naive travel journal by a young and idealistic Englishman. With a preface by Beatrice Webb, of course ;) I mean,

If, in the USSR, a citizen is tried for any offence it is the duty of the trade union not only to pay any expenses which may arise out of the case, but in addition to assist the court in the reform of the person concerned, if found guity. In the case of a serious offence the person may be deprived of liberty and sent to a labour camp. In such circumstances he or she will lose trade union membership. But a common treatment of less serious offences lies in the imposition of what is called, strangely enough, "forced labour". When condemned to forced labour, a Soviet citizen retains his or her liberty, but a regular deduction is made from wages as a sort of instalment-system fine...

From 1917 to the present time much propaganda in this country has been carried on to the effect that in the USSR there are no longer moral standards. Nothing could be more misleading. (...)

This is from 1938.

[liberalnot]

thanks for the gareth jones tip. i, too, had never heard of him. but then it's obvious--the leftists are always the ones in the news.

i was amazed a couple of weeks ago to find in the print ed of the new york times that when they listed all of the pulitzers they've won, that they listed walter duranty for 1932! unbelievable.

the standard source on the number of deaths in stalinist russia has been robert conquest and his book on the same.

i've been in los angeles all day and am tired.

[T'wit]

The Muggeridge piece is stunning. It is the very moment of disillusion of a man reared on socialism, in his every thought and hope a True Believer, who at last sees the grim and hideous truth. His words are like swords slicing down on venomous snakes.

[DPB101]

The print version isn't as bad as the New York Times list of Pulitzers on the net. All they say is Duranty won it and then "his reporting has been discredited by New York Times reporters and others".

Ten million dying on the streets and his story had been merely "discredited?"

Gareth Jones and others laid out the facts in 1933. Duranty wrote what Stalin told him to write.