During the
New Economic Policy with its mixed economy, Duranty's articles from Moscow did not draw wide attention. It was after the advent of the
first five-year plan (1928–1933), which aimed to transform Soviet industry and agriculture, that Duranty made his mark.
In 1929, he was granted an exclusive interview with
Joseph Stalin that greatly enhanced his reputation as a journalist. Duranty was to remain in Moscow for twelve years, settling in the United States in 1934. Thereafter, he remained on
retainer for
The New York Times, which required him to spend several months a year in
Moscow. It was in this capacity that Duranty reported on the
show trials of Stalin's political opponents in 1936–1938....
In
The New York Times on 31 March 1933, Walter Duranty denounced reports of a famine and, in particular, he attacked
Gareth Jones, a British journalist who had witnessed the starving in Ukraine and issued a widely published press release about their plight two days earlier in Berlin. (Jones' release was itself immediately preceded by three unsigned articles describing the famine in the
Manchester Guardian.)
[14]
Under the title "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving" Duranty's article described the situation 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".
The "diplomatic duel" was a reference to the arrest of engineers from the
Metropolitan-Vickers company who were working in the USSR. Accused with Soviet citizens of "wrecking" (sabotaging) the plant they were building, they were the subjects of one in a series of show trials presided over by
Andrey Vyshinsky[15] during the First Five Year Plan.
Five months later (23 August 1933), in another
New York Times article, 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 [i.e. Kuban Region], and 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."
[16] The duel in the press over the famine stories did not damage esteem for Duranty.
The Nation then described his reporting as "the most enlightened, dispassionate dispatches from a great nation in the making which appeared in any newspaper in the world."
[17]
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."
[17]
Sally J. Taylor, author of the critical Duranty biography
Stalin's Apologist, argues that his reporting from the USSR was a key factor in U.S. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1933 decision to grant official recognition to the Soviet Union and thus revoked the United States' recognition of an independent Ukraine.
[6]...
Since the late 1960s, Duranty's work has come increasingly under fire for failing to report the famine.
Robert Conquest was critical of Duranty's reporting in
The Great Terror (1968),
The Harvest of Sorrow (1986) and, most recently, in
Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1990).
Joseph Alsop and Andrew Stuttaford spoke out against Duranty during the Pulitzer Prize controversy.
[22] "Lying was Duranty's stock in trade," commented Alsop. In his memoirs British journalist
Malcolm Muggeridge, then
The Manchester Guardian's correspondent in Moscow, talked of Duranty's "persistent lying"
[23] and elsewhere called him "the greatest liar I ever knew.".
[24]...
It was clear, meanwhile, from Duranty's comments to others that he was fully aware of the scale of the calamity. In 1934 he privately reported to the British embassy in Moscow that as many as 10 million people may have died, directly or indirectly, from famine in the Soviet Union in the previous year.
[25]
Both
British intelligence[26] and American engineer Zara Witkin (1900–1940),
[27] who worked in the USSR from 1932 to 1934,
[28] confirmed that Duranty knowingly misrepresented information about the nature and scale of the famine.
There are some indications that Duranty's deliberate misdirection concerning the famine may have been the result of duress. Conquest believed Duranty was being blackmailed over his sexual proclivities.
[29]
In his 1944 book, Duranty speaks in a chastened tone about his 1932–34 reporting, but he offers only a Stalinist defense of it.
[30] He admits that people starved, including not just "class enemies" but also loyal communists,
[30] but he says that Stalin was forced to order the requisitions to equip the Red Army enough to deter an imminent Japanese invasion
[30] (a reprise of the
Siberian Intervention of a decade earlier)—in other words, to save the Soviet Union from impending military doom, not because Stalin wanted to collectivize the population at gunpoint, on pain of death.
[30] Although it is likely that Stalin
did expect a Japanese invasion (expecting foreign attacks all the time), historians today do not accept the view that it was his
sole motivation and that Stalin did not intend any cruel and ruthless political dominance of the Soviet population....
The New York Times still proudly displays the Pulitzer prizes awarded to Duranty for his articles defending Stalin and covering up Stalins murders.
