Walter Duranty

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Walter Duranty
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Walter Duranty

Walter Duranty (1884–1957), born in Liverpool, England, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a set of stories he wrote in 1931 as The New York Times’ Moscow correspondent, covering Joseph Stalin's Five-Year Plan to industrialize the Soviet Union. The award of the Pulitzer Prize to him has become afterward controversial due largely to Duranty's reporting on the Ukrainian famine in 1933.

After finishing college, he moved to Paris. He lost a leg in a railway accident. During the first world war, he avoided military service through his job as a reporter. In 1919, he gained initial notice from a story about the Paris Peace Conference. He then moved to Riga to cover events in the newly independent Baltic States. Duranty moved to the Soviet Union in 1921. In 1929, he was granted an exclusive interview with Joseph Stalin which enhanced his reputation.

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[edit] Views on the Soviet Union

In the reporting that won him the Pulitzer Prize, Duranty held that the Russian people were "Asiatic" in thought. That meant to him that they valued communial effort and required autocratic government. To him, individuality and private enterprise were simply impossible alien concepts to the Russian people which only led to social disruption. Attempts since the time of Peter the Great to apply Western ideals in Russia were a failed form of European Colonialism that had been finally swept away by the 1917 Revolution. Lenin and his NEP were both failures tainted by western thought. The post-Lenin/Pre-Stalin era was an inefficient debating society rather than a government. In contrast, Stalinism was a pure Russian ideology. Russians had the mentality of ants and Stalinist Russia was an ant hill. Russians who did not think like "ants" had been inflected by western ideas which could not work in Russia and could only damage the stability of the ant hill or make the other "ants" unhappy.

In a June 24, 1931 article in the New York Times, Duranty gives his views of the Soviet actions in the countryside that eventually led to the famine in the Ukraine. He described those who opposed collectivization of farming as an "almost privileged class" that had been created by mistake by Lenin. He said that the same logic that led to the overthrow of the Czarist regime must inevitably lead to the destruction of these people who he numbered at 5,000,000. He compared Stalin's logic in the matter to that of the Biblical Prophet Samuel or Tamerlane. He said that these people had to be "liquidated or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian mass". Duranty claimed the Siberian labor camps were a means of giving individuals a chance to re-join soviet society but also said that for those who could not accept the system, "the final fate of such enemies is death.". Duranty, though describing the system as cruel, says he has "no brief for or against it, nor any purpose save to try to tell the truth". He ends the article with the claim that brutal collectivization campaign which led to the famine was motivated by the "hope or promise of a subsequent raising up" of asian-minded masses in Soviet Union which only history could judge.

Rather than just repeating the Stalinist viewpoint, Duranty often admitted the brutality of the Stalinist system and then proceeded to both explain and defend why dictatorship or brutality were necessary.

[edit] The Famine

In 1932, reports of famine in the Ukraine started appearing from journalists such as Gareth Jones of the London Times and Malcolm Muggeridge of The Manchester Guardian. Both men defied travel restrictions and secretly went to view conditions in the Ukraine. In the spring of 1933, Jones left the Soviet Union and reported the famine under his own name in the Manchester Guardian. Around the same time, six British citizens were arrested on charges of industrial espionage. 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.' "

English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who had been secretly in Ukraine for The Manchester Guardian, later called Duranty "the greatest liar I have met in journalism." But while Gareth Jones had published his articles under his own name, the Muggeridge articles were published in the Guardian without Muggeridge's name on them. Neither Muggeridge nor any other member of the press establishment covering the Soviet Union came to the public defense of Gareth Jones. And while Gareth Jones wrote letters supporting the unattributed articles in the Guardian, Muggeridge did not write similar articles to the New York Times supporting Jones.

Contradicting what he had written in the New York Times, on September 26, 1933 in a private conversation with British Diplomat William Strang, he said, "it is quite possible 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."

The duel in the press over the famine stories came at the same time as sensitive negotiations over American establishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. After relations were established in November of 1933, a dinner was given for Soviet Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov in New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Walter Duranty was given such a prominent role in the dinner that Alexander Woolcott wrote, "Indeed, one quite got the impression that America, in a spasm of discernment, was recognizing both Russia and Walter Duranty."

[edit] Criticisms

Right-wing writers such as Robert Conquest and Sally J. Taylor, have criticized Duranty for his alleged deference to Joseph Stalin's. Conquest has written any number of books from the 1970s onward including The Great Terror and Harvest of Sorrows which have been critical of Duranty's reporting from the Soviet Union. Taylor wrote a book in 1990 called Stalin's Apologist : Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow (ISBN 0-19-505700-7).

Right-wing political activists such as Joe Alsop and Andrew Stuttaford have also been critical of Duranty. [1]

The New York Times hired a professor of Russian history to review Duranty's work. That professor, Mark Von Hagen of Columbia University, concluded Mr. Duranty's reports to be unbalanced and uncritical, and they far too often gave voice to Stalinist propaganda. [2]

In his New York Times articles (including one published on March 31, 1933), allegedly repeatedly denied the existence of a famine in 1932–33. In an article in NYT, August 24 1933, he was selectively quoted "any report of a famine is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda".

However, reading Duranty's work in the full context, he clearly acknowledged that famine had taken place in the USSR. By the end of August when he wrote that article, famine had indeed ended in the USSR precisesly because of the splendid 1933 harvest. Duranty wrote in that same article: 'The excellent harvest about to be gathered shows that any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda Clearly, Duranty was speaking in the present tense. He was correct with the statement that there was not famine in the USSR by the end of August 1933.

Duranty, in the same article, wrote the following:

The food shortage which has affected almost the whole population in the last year, and particularly in the grain-producing provinces--that is, the Ukraine, North Caucasus, the Lower Volga region--has, however, caused heavy loss of life. So with a total population in the Ukraine, North Caucasus and Lower Volga of upward of 40,000,000 the normal death rate would have been about 1,000,000. Lacking official figures, it is a conservative to suppose that this was at least trebled last year in those provinces and considerably increased for the Soviet Union as a whole.

Duranty clearly acknowledged severe economic hardships among the population. Duranty was correct in saying that deaths resulted from manifold diseases rather than actual starvation. Soviet data showed 800,000 cases of typhus in 1933. In the famine-stricken regions of Ukraine, North Caucasus, and Lower Volga, Duranty estimated that there were perhaps 2 million excess deaths. Duranty proved himself correct nearly 60 years before the exposure of declassified Soviet data. For 1933 declassified Soviet data showed a total of 1.73 million excess deaths in Ukraine, Lower Volga, and North Caucasus in 1933.

Therefore, not only did Duranty acknowledge the occurrence of famine which he correctly called a food shortage, he also proved remarkably accurate in his estimations of the demographic consequences.

[edit] Later Career

Duranty lived in Moscow for twelve years leaving in 1934. Later in that same year, he visited the White House in the company of Soviet Officals including Litvinov. He continued as a special correspondent for the New York Times through 1940.

He wrote several books on the Soviet Union but never changed his opinions nor expressed remorse for his false reporting. He died in Florida in 1957.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Pulitzer Prize Articles by Walter Duranty

[edit] Books

  • The curious lottery, and other tales of Russian justice, New York : Coward-McCann (1929)
  • Red Economics, New York : Houghton Mifflin Company, (1932)
  • Duranty reports Russia, New York : The Viking Press (1934)
  • I write as I please. New York : Simon and Schuster (1935)
  • One life, one kopeck; a novel, New York : Simon and Schuster (1937)
  • Babies without tails, stories by Walter Duranty. New York: Modern Age Books (1937)
  • The Kremlin and the people, New York : Reynal & Hitchcock, inc (1941)
  • USSR : the story of soviet Russia, New York : J.B. Lippincott Company (1944)
  • Stalin & Co. : the Politburo, the men who run Russia, New York : W. Sloane Associates (1949)

[edit] References

  • Muggeridge, Malcolm Winter in Moscow (1934)
  • Conquest, Robert The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (1968)
  • Conquest, Robert, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986)
  • Crowl, James W. Angels in Stalin's Paradise: Western Reporters in Soviet Russia, 1917-1937; A Case Study of Louis Fischer and Walter Duranty. Washington, D.C.: The University of America Press (1981), ISBN 0-8191-2185-1
  • Taylor, Sally J. Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty : The New York Times Man in Moscow. Oxford University Press (1990), ISBN 0-19-505700-7

[edit] The Pulitzer Prize Controversy

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