In a New York Times article dated 23 August 1933, Duranty wrote, "Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda. The food shortage, however, which has affected the whole population in the last year and particularly in the grain-producing provinces—the Ukraine, North Caucasus, the Lower Volga—has, however, caused heavy loss of life." Duranty concluded "it is conservative to suppose" that, in certain provinces with a total population of over 40 million, mortality had "at least trebled." [7]
On March 31, 1933, Walter Duranty denounced the famine stories and Gareth Jones in The New York Times. In the piece, he described the situation under the title "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving" as follows: "In the middle of the diplomatic duel between Great Britain and the Soviet Union over the accused British engineers, there appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with 'thousands already dead and millions menaced by death from starvation." Malcolm Muggeridge, a correspondent for The Manchester Guardian, called Duranty a "liar".
The duel in the press over the famine stories did not damage esteem for Duranty—whose reporting The Nation had described as "the most enlightened, dispassionate dispatches from a great nation in the making which appeared in any newspaper in the world."[8] Following sensitive negotiations in November 1933 that resulted in the establishment of relations between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., a dinner was given for Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov in New York City's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Each of the attendees' names was read in turn, politely applauded by the guests, until Duranty's. Whereupon, Alexander Woollcott wrote, "the one really prolonged pandemonium was evoked.... Indeed, one quite got the impression that America, in a spasm of discernment, was recognizing both Russia and Walter Duranty
