Stalin's Apologist Walter Duranty

...Indeed, what is most upsetting is to read about the honors heapedupon Duranty for his offenses...

...Today Duranty is little known, but his story remains a parable for journalists who seek a place in the limelight by ingratiating themselves with those in power—for journalists who have no moral or human commitment to the truth...

...Malcolm Muggeridge called Duranty "the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism...

...That judgment, coming from an AmerTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 45 ican capitalist trying to decide whether to sign a 20-year contract with the Soviets, allows us an insight as to why some members of the American establishment welcomed Duranty's reporting...

...As it turned out, Duranty became the symbol of "the West's failure to recognize and understand at the time" that the famine of 1932-33 was "the greatest man-made disaster ever recorded...

...Before long his apologias and obfuscations would lead America's beleaguered anti-Stalinist left to refer to the New York Times as the "uptown Daily Worker...

...Most of the other Western correspondents—including later anti-Communists like Lyons and Louis Fischer—were equally guilty of not reporting the sordid reality of Stalinism...

...He had not always left this impression...

...Reporting for the Times from the French battlefields of World War I, he distinguished himself in vividly personal dispatches on the character of the fighting and the sacrifices of the Allied soldiers...

...ing one and rode it to fame and power...

...He explained the infamous Moscow Thais as part of the tragedy of the "Russian soul...

...One can only hope that our modern equivalents of Walter Duranty end their careers in the richly deserved obscurity in which Duranty ended his...

...He was resigned to living on funds borrowed from old friends like the now successful John Gunther, and to begging the Times's publisher for a small pension...

...Observes Taylor: "The Western establishment that feted him, no less than the Kremlin, had found their man...

...He is co-author of The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth (Holt Rinehart & Winston...

...It was under his guidance that the homely Duranty, for some reason always a charmer to women, began a series of ménages a trois that became a regular part of his life...

...Ambitious and competitive, Duranty volunteered for and received the Moscow beat...

...Harriman was offered his concession, although when Duranty told him he thought Lenin's New Economic Policy would come to a quick end under Stalin, the industrialist turned it down...

...The late Averell Harriman said that Duranty advised him in 1926 that if he wanted a concession for exploitation of mineral deposits, the man to see was Stalin, not Trotsky...

...From the point of view of power politics, Duranty had called the shots accurately...

...Duranty's lies, unfortunately, af- fected others besides his readers, and had the true facts about the Communist-produced famine been made known, Taylor argues, the course of history might have been changed...

...It was he who first said that "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs," which quickly became "the standard rationalization of Stalin's actions during the First Five-Year Plan . . . the brutal process of collectivization, the `liquidation of the kulaks as a class and the devastating famine that followed...

...On the eve of war, the Times closed down its Moscow bureau...

...But he was not, as Eugene Lyons and others charged, a paid tool of the KGB...

...Covering the very first purge trials of engineers accused of sabotage in 1928, Duranty had written in the New Republic that "most of the accused . . . deserve their fate...

...Duranty, returning to the United States, fell into alcoholism and quickly frittered away his earnings and reputation...

...The "confessions were true," he wrote, and he went on to explain in his autobiography that from 1934 on, the Soviet state had entered the phase of "secret conspiracy," which saw Japan and Germany plotting with Trotsky to overthrow the Soviet leadership...

...1=1...

...The man who coined the term "Stalinism" became, as Taylor writes, "the main source of information for the leftists of the 1930s," and thus helped fan the flames of Western Communism...

...24.95 Ronald Radosh On the day it reviewed this book last June, the New York Times ran an unprecedented editorial by Karl E. Meyer, Jr., a member of its editorial board, commenting that the reporting of Walter Duranty during the 1920s and 1930s from the Soviet Union was "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper...

...Duranty knew the facts and chose not to report them: according to S. J. Taylor, he issued a private report to the British Mission that 10 million may have starved during the collectivization drives...

...recognition of the Soviet Union...

...It was his good luck to arrive just as Stalin was consolidating power, and, when others were hesitant to pick out which of the Bolshevik leaders would replace the dying Lenin, Duranty hitched his star to Stalin's risRonald Radosh is professor of history at Queensborough Community College and the Graduate Center...

...The dictator had good reason to be pleased...

...A few days after, at a dinner honoring Litvinov at the Waldorf-Astoria, the assembled dignitaries rose to their feet and cheered when Duranty was introduced...

...Exceptions were Gareth Jones, Muggeridge, and William Henry Chamberlin...

...In our time, the sort of journalism Duranty practiced is reserved for papers like New York's Village Voice, which humiliated itself a few years ago by running a lead story attacking Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow, claiming that Conquest's thorough account of the Soviet famine was based on propaganda perpetrated by fascist Ukrainian refugees...

...Duranty had the opportunity to "save, perhaps, millions of lives...

...And he did not do it...

...When Franklin D. Roosevelt announced recognition in 1933, Duranty traveled back to the United States in the company of Soviet ambassador Maxim Litvinov, giving the impression that much of what had occurred was his doing...

...His personal life, however, was always sordid, particularly after he fell in with the bizarre Aleister Crowley, known to British and Americans in Paris as a practitioner of black magic and occult orgies and an early dope fiend...

...Duranty's legacy is also carried on in the pages of the Nation, where Alex-ander Cockburn engages in arcane arguments about supposed exaggerations of the number of people killed under Stalin...

...He not only received the Pulitzer, but was also widely and fallaciously credited with arranging behind-the-scenes U.S...

...You bet on our horse to win when others thought it had no chance and I am sure you have not lost by it...

...You have done a good job," the dictator told him, referring to an interview that ran in the Times, " . . . because you try to tell the truth about our country...

...Their concern was profit and loss, not whether Stalin was murdering millions of his subjects or whether a Western reporter was aiding and abetting him...

...Returning to Moscow, he received his ultimate payoff...

...It was an amazing mea culpa, considering that Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize for precisely that coverage in 1932...

...It was classic "applied Stalinism," as Taylor dubs it, and Duranty, a non-Communist, was the man spreading it through the West under the imprimatur of the New York Times...

...His reports, the Prize Committee noted, were marked "by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity," all these accolades for a reporter whose signal contribution was to cover up the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33...

...Duranty's sole motivations were prestige, money, and influence...

...Stalin summoned the correspondent to his Kremlin office for a one-hour talk...

...As Harriman recalled decades later, Duranty's analysis "was the most penetrating of any reporter of the time...

...City University of New York...