Stalin’s Apologist

Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man in Moscow by S. J. Taylor, Oxford University Press, 1990. 

Estonia

After the end of World War I, the United States supported independence for the Baltic states, and sent Naval Commander John A. Gade to Estonia. The New York Times sent Duranty to Estonia to cover the Commander Gade. Walter Duranty interviewed a Russian sailor that the Bolsheviks had sent to Latvia with money and jewels to be given to American Communists. The resulting Red Courier story that Duranty wrote for the New York Times helped Duranty make a name for himself.

Moscow

In 1920 Charles Merz and Walter Lippman performed a content analysis of The New York Times coverage of the Soviet Union. They concluded that it was biased toward wishful thinking that the Bolsheviks would fall from power. The New York Times decided that they needed to have a reporter in Moscow.

1921 Famine

The American Relief Administration offered to help the Soviet Union with the 1921 famine in the Ukraine. But in order to receive famine relief, the United States demanded that the Bolsheviks allow Western reporters into Russia. The Bolsheviks did not want Walter Duranty, because his stories were generally anti-Bolshevik in tone. But when Duranty wrote a more neutral and objective report on Lenin’s New Economic Program, they relented. Duranty became The New York Time’s correspondent in Moscow.

Censorship

The Bolsheviks promised that they would not censor the stories the reporters sent back, except concerning military matters. But over the succeeding years, the Bolshevik censorship became tighter. Reporters risked losing their visas if they were too negative about the Soviet Union. Walter Duranty was the main reporter that the New York Times had in the Soviet Union during the 1930s.

NKVD

The NKVD provided Duranty with a comfortable apartment, an automobile, and a cook, named Katya, who became his mistress. Duranty hosted many parties in Moscow for his fellow expats and was known for being an amusing raconteur. Duranty rarely ventured out into the countryside, and so his reporting was based upon what he could obtain from sources in Moscow, most of which were the government itself.

Stalin

Duranty was an early predictor that the successor to Lenin would be Stalin, because Stalin was better at political infighting. Duranty introduced the term Stalinism. Duranty interviewed Stalin for The New York Times, and a few weeks later he wrote a profile of Stalin for The New York Times Magazine. 

Holodomor

There was a second famine in the Ukraine during 1932-1933. his genocide is now called the Holodomor. It was not the result of natural disaster, but of Stalin’s forced collectivization of the farms of the Ukraine. The Red Army stole grain from the Ukrainian farmers and sold it abroad. The Bolshevik agents stole the individually owned farm animals and possessions and put them under the regime’s lock and key. Many Ukrainian farmers slaughtered their farm animals, rather than surrender them to the Bolsheviks.

Kulaks

Stalin also deported to Siberia millions of the more prosperous peasants, who were called kulaks. Kulak is the Russian word for fist, and it was applied, because many of them were money lenders.

Internal Passports

In December 1932, the government introduced internal passports to prevent starving peasants from entering the cities.

Walter Duranty Reports on Ukraine

Duranty supported the Soviet collectivization of agriculture. Duranty blamed the food shortage on the farmers who killed their farm animals rather than surrender them to the Bolsheviks Duranty promoted the Soviet view that the famine was the result of a conspiracy of wreckers obstructing collectivization. Duranty believed that in order to safeguard the Bolshevik revolution, it was more important to feed the factory workers than the peasants. Duranty repeatedly emphasized the distinction between people dying directly from malnutrition, and those dying from diseases that malnutrition made them vulnerable to, in order to minimize the number of people who could technically be said to died from starvation Duranty dismissed German reports of wide-scale famine.

North Caucasus

September 1933: Duranty went to the North Caucasus to report on famine. After returning, Duranty reported to the British Embassy in Moscow that millions were dying. Harrison Salisbury believed that when Duranty actually saw the extent of the famine with his own eyes, he was unwilling to admit that his previous assessment had been wrong. Years later, in retrospect, Duranty justified the transfers of grain from Ukraine to the Red Army in the Soviet Far East, because the Soviet Union was fighting the expansion of the Japanese empire.

Malcom Muggeridge

Bolsheviks banned the foreign press from traveling to the famine areas. However, Malcolm Muggeridge managed to sneak into the Ukraine and find out what the Soviet government was hiding. His stories were smuggled out in diplomatic bags. Muggeridge published the truth in The Manchester Guardian in March 1933. The reward that Muggeridge received for his achievement was being black-listing by the British Left, mainly by Beatrice Webb.

Gareth Jones

The Moscow foreign press conspired to deny the reports of Welshman Gareth Jones that there was widespread famine in the Ukraine. A few months later, when travel restrictions in the Soviet Union were lifted, the Ukrainian famine was old news, and received little attention by the press.

Diplomatic Recognition

Walter Duranty favored the United States offering diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. In November 1933, Duranty accompanied Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov on his voyage across the Atlantic. Litvinov negotiated diplomatic ties with FDR. At the New York Waldorf-Astoria a dinner was held in honor of Litvinov. Duranty attended the dinner. When Duranty was introduced at the dinner, he was cheered by the crowd for facilitating the Soviet-American rapprochement. (The U.S. State Department believed that reporting the famine would harm efforts to achieve diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union.)

Pulitzer Prize

Reporter Walter Duranty believed that to be an objective reporter, he must not make moral judgements. But not only did Duranty fail to denounce Stalin’s crimes, he even helped cover them up. Duranty excused Stalin’s excesses by repeating the saying of the French Revolution figure Robespierre that you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. But where was the omelet? Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his reporting from Moscow. Duranty was not a believer in Communist ideology, he was merely an amoral careerist.