He Wrote as He Pleased

...Justas in l921,he ascribed the death toll to other causes: "There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from disease due to malnutrition, especially in the Ukraine...

...In 1918 Duranty was sent to the Belgian front, where he filed a number of front-page stories...

...He quickly spotted Stalin's political strength, describing him as "one of the most remarkable men in Russia and perhaps the most influential figure here today...

...Too often Taylor takes Duranty's self-representations in/ Write As I Please at face value...

...He was disappointed...

...The sybaritic life he had grown accustomed to in Paris suffered no interruption in Moscow...

...By 1940 the Times had closed its Moscow bureau and cabled Duranty, stationed in Romania, that it would no longer keep him on retainer...

...The Times' Baltic dispatches—including Duranty's—were so virulently anti-Bolshevik that Charles Merz and Walter Lippmann were provoked to write their celebrated attack on the reliability of the paper's foreign reporting, "ATestoftheNews," publishedin the August 4, 1920 New Republic...

...In 1935 he published his best-selling autobiography, / Write As I Please, notable for sneering at reporters who make "moral judgments" and "prate of ruthless methods...

...it was he, in fact, who coined the term "Stalinism...

...Until now the only scholarly attention that Duranty has received has focused on his cover-up of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine...

...He eagerly joined in the homosexual orgies and satanic rituals Crowley organized, a harbinger of his life-long fascination with sex, opium and alcohol...

...To him they were a brutish lot who had to be whipped and tortured by Stalin if the Soviet Union was ever to progress to "self-discipline and self-government...

...Yet despite Duranty's notoriety, S.J...

...In 1919 the new Paris bureau chief, Charles Seiden, who mistrusted Duranty, shipped him off to the Baltic states to cover the Russian Civil War...

...In addition to his wife Jane, Duranty kept a Russian mistress, his cook Katya...

...She notes that Duranty "affected a superiority to any kind of morality," but leaves unaddressed the question of whether he was a closet megalomaniac or merely an opportunist adapting himself to a totalitarian state...

...Bolitho dismissed any talk of democracy as "a trick by cunning demagogues to kid the masses...

...To come to Moscow without checking in with Duranty was unthinkable for those in the know, " observes Taylor...

...In 1913, following months of pestering New York Times Pans bureau chief Wythe Williams for a job, he was finally hired as Williams' factotum...

...Sudden death [became] a commonplace, and vermin a joke...

...He defended the Great Purge trials, for example, claiming that they had exposed a nefarious Trotskyist conspiracy...

...Did he really believe, for instance, that the defendants in the '30s show trials were guilty of plotting against Stalin...

...Reviewed by Jacob Heilbrunn Assistant editor, "The National Interest" Denounced as a KGB agent by Joseph Alsop, lauded as "the greatest of foreign correspondents to cover Moscow" by William L. Shirer—Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent during the 1920s and '30s, may be judged the most controversial journalist of the 20th century...

...But Duranty's career was fading...

...indeed, "there would always be the mingling of truth and the elements of fiction in his work...

...Reduced to working for wire services, desperate for money, Duranty published in the 1940s a number of potted histories of the Soviet Union...

...In 1957, on his deathbed in Orlando, Florida, he married his last companion, Anna Enwright...

...Throughout all this Duranty retained his acute instincts...

...Taylor is the first biographer to chronicle his remarkable career...

...Duranty was born in 1884intoaprosperous Liverpool merchant family...

...The attention Duranty won for his War dispatches gained him enemies at the Times...

...He regularly attended Isadora Duncan's wild soirées...

...From 1934 on, Duranty worked on a retainer basis for the Times...

...WhileatCambridge he refined the colorful prose style, studded with classical allusions, that he would later employ as a foreign correspondent...

...While Taylor properly dismisses the notion that Duranty was a Soviet agent, she does convincingly argue that his cook/mistress in Moscow was almost surely a KGB informant...

...The selection committee declared that his dispatches were "marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and exceptional clarity...

...To be sure, Western correspondents in Moscow faced constant pressure from Soviet censors to dilute their reports...

...Taylor's Stalin's Apologist demonstrates that to understand why Duranty admired and praised the Soviet tyrant, it is essential to examine not only his dispatches but also his rather strange life...

...Privately, however, Duranty revealed to the British Embassy in Moscow "that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year...

...Taylor is admirably cautious in assigning motives to Duranty for his mendacious reporting...

...After the civil war, Times managing editor Carr Van Anda appointed Duranty the newspaper's Moscow correspondent, in the hope that having a full-time man on the scene would result in sounder treatment of the Soviet Union...

...For recreation Duranty served as a "priest" in his friend Aleister "the Beast" Crowley's cult...

...He spent the decade mostly in the United States, traveling, drinking, and living extravagantly with various women in New York and Hollywood...

...A stellar student, he attended Harrow and then read classics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he was a classmateof Hugh Walpole's...

...Soonhe was a celebrity himself, hosting such luminaries as Sinclair Lewis and his wife Dorothy Thompson...

...Taylor leaves little doubt about Duranty's elitism, but if she had quoted more liberally from his '30s Times dispatches, the special disdain he felt for the Soviet masses would have become clearer...

...Unfortunately, she also ignores Hugh Trevor-Roper's injunction (in the Foreword to Tixe Hermit of Peking) that the historian should writeof his subject "as far as possible, solely from external sources, without any reference to his memoirs, even as a starting point...

...Yetinl932when Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones published accounts exposing the gravity of Stalin's man-made famine in the Ukraine, Duranty rushed to defend the Kremlin...

...This irked Van Anda, as did his correspondent's blithe acceptance of the guilt of Father Butchkavitch, a Russian Catholic priest who was tried and executed by the Bolsheviks as a Polish spy...

...In Taylor's view, Bolitho exercised a decisive influence on Duranty, impressing upon him the principle that, since most people are almost always wrong about everything, "there are long odds in favor of your being right if you take the opposite view from the majority...

...His newspaper reports never wavered in their support for Stalin...

...For his gallimaufry of half-truths and outright lies, Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1932...

...Covering the 1921 Russian famine, Duranty "seemed personally untouched by the suffering he was witnessing," writes Taylor, and "made much of the distinction that most of the people died not from hunger but of the diseases related to hunger, a fact that turned up in his work with great frequency...

...He also began to cultivate a "philosophy of detachment," according to Taylor, seeing "events and people as a source of entertainment...

...Observing the fighting first-hand inured him to suffering, he liked to claim...

...In using this news event as "the vehicle for dramatic action," says Taylor, he revealed himself to be "more writer than reporter...

...There Duranty encountered his friend William Bolitho, who was serving as a reporter for the Manchester Guardian...

...During the '50s, abandoned by most of his friends, Duranty relied on John Günther for money...

...Duranty's first important story was about the German Zeppelin raid on Paris...

...As exhaustive as Stalin's Apologist undeniably is when it comes to recounting the particulars of Duranty's life, it does not completely penetrate the bluff and bombast behind which he concealed himself from scrutiny...

...Upon visiting the North Caucasus, Duranty asserted that talk of famine was "a sheer absurdity...

...Although Duranty was viewed as an oracle by many of his colleagues and readers, his vaunted method of "putting himself in another man'sshoes" led him to identify with Stalin and dissemble the dictator's crimes...

...As he put it, he developed "ameasureof indifferenceto blood and squalor, and fear and pity...

...As the only correspondent to predict Stalin's rise to power (and one of the few journalists to prognosticate the survival of the Soviet State), Duranty's career was intimately linked with Stalin's...

...If this is true, it would seem that the Soviet archives are our last hope of finding new information that would help decipher the reasons for his deceitful reporting...

...Duranty went to Uve in Paris after graduating from Cambridge...

...In accepting the award, Duranty praised Stalin for having "grown into a really great statesman...

...Nevertheless, Duranty remained at his post...

...When the Times' Berlin correspondent, Frederick Birchall, reported that there were as many as 4 million victims of starvation in the Soviet Union, Duranty derided him as the "credulous American correspondent in Berlin...

...One wishes, too, that Taylor had attempted to examine Duranty's inner life, and particularly the nature of his fixation with Stalin...

...Until they are opened, Stalin's Apologist will probably remain the best source for those wishing to understand Duranty's perplexing personality...