Walter Duranty and the Cover-Up of the Holodomor

“The epitome of evil in journalism.” “The originator of fake news.” “The biggest liar of all journalists.” “Fashion prostitute in the service of the Communists.”

These are highly unusual terms to describe a journalist and Moscow correspondent for the prestigious New York Times, who has even been awarded a prestigious journalism prize to top it all off. But Walter Duranty was really all of these things. In a 1935 interview, he recalled how his pious grandmother used to whisper to him as a child, when he lied, “Liars go to hell and burn in hellfire for eternity”. Duranty said that this would explain not only why he was not very fond of his grandmother, but also his complete aversion to lying, which, he claimed, was the only appropriate way for a journalist to live. Except that Walter Duranty lied, in fact, he was behind one of the biggest lies of the 20th century – a lie that ultimately contributed to the deaths of millions of people.

When the winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious award in journalism, were announced on 8 May this year, they included contributors to the New York Times ‘for their unflinching coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including an eight-month investigation into the Ukrainian deaths in the town of Buche and the Russian unit responsible for the killings’.

That was 132. The New York Times has won more Pulitzer Prizes than any other news organisation, the first in 1918.

But the war in Ukraine has renewed questions about whether the New York Times should return the Pulitzer it won 90 years ago for the work of Walter Duranty, the charismatic chief correspondent from the Soviet Union.

“He is the epitome of evil in journalism”, says Oksana Piaseckyj, a Ukrainian-American activist who came to the US in 1950 as a child refugee and is one of many campaigning for the award’s return. They have recently been joined by a new voice: former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, who himself won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his reporting on the Soviet Union for the New York Times.

As had happened in the 1930s, the autocrat’s decrees now caused the mass death of Ukrainian civilians, relying on disinformation to cover it up. And then, as now, journalists, including Duranty, were censored and threatened in Russia. (One US diplomat later wrote that Duranty told him that his reports had to reflect “the official opinion of the Soviet regime”. But in an era before social networks and the internet, foreign journalists were among the few who could deliver news to the rest of the world, so their credibility was of paramount importance.

Walter Duranty was born on 25 May 1884 into a middle-class family in Liverpool, England. His grandparents moved from the West Indies to Birkenhead on the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire in 1842 and set up a successful trading business, which was then taken over by his father William Steel Duranty. Walter was educated at Harrow, one of the most prestigious public schools in the UK, but the sudden collapse of the family business forced him to transfer to a school in Bedford. However, he won a scholarship to study at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he graduated with honours.

After graduating, he moved to Paris, where he met the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley and worked with him in magical rituals. Duranty became involved with Crowley’s mistress, Jane Cheron, who was addicted to opium but had considerable wealth. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why he eventually married her.

During the First World War, Duranty began working as a reporter for the New York Times. A story he wrote in 1919 about the Paris Peace Conference brought him wider journalistic attention. That same year, the New York Times hired him as a correspondent from Russia. Although he spoke no Russian and knew very little about the Soviet Union, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to his role.

Despite his lack of knowledge and the fact that most of his information came from government press releases, Duranty initially tried to present himself as an expert on communism and Russia. He published incredibly anti-Soviet articles in which he vehemently attacked the “Bolshevik gang in Moscow” and predicted that the regime and the whole country would soon collapse. However, even at that time, his writing, especially on the Polish-Soviet war, was full of false reports and facts.

Luck in the form of the Russian famine

Nevertheless, Duranty kept his job and in July 1921 was chosen as one of a handful of journalists who went to Russia to cover the famine there. It was a major career achievement and Duranty wrote eloquently about the catastrophe, which killed an estimated five million people: “Fortune smiled on me in the form of the Russian famine!”

For Duranty, the Russian famine was a real turning point. He learned to speak Russian and to break through the strict Soviet censorship of the international press. By the mid-1920s, he had cemented his position as one of the leading Western correspondents from Russia – his anti-Soviet tirades had disappeared, and in return he was showered with money, a big apartment, a mistress and not just one but two interviews with Joseph Stalin, which all journalists craved.

1928 was a particularly important year for Stalin, when he presented his first five-year plan for Russia, which aimed to collectivise agriculture and increase industrial production. However, the way in which he intended to achieve this came at a huge cost in human lives. Hordes of unskilled peasants were transferred to work in the new factories, where they lived in desperate conditions and were in constant danger from heavy machinery with which they had no experience.

Even worse was the consequence of the collectivisation of agriculture. Private farms were to be transferred to state ownership, and many who owned or lived off the land understandably resisted the changes, going so far as to destroy their crops and fields to prevent a government takeover. Those who resisted were branded ‘kulaks’ and represented as enemies of Russia. Stalin used everything from the army to the secret police to force the peasants to hand over their land, and it was decided to liquidate the kulaks ‘as a class’.

In 1930 Duranty came across a train of kulaks being transported to exile in Central Asia, and later described them as “more like caged animals than human beings … the wreckage and debris of the march towards progress”. In his reports for the New York Times, however, he said very little about the treatment of the kulaks, describing mainly the positive aspects of the Five-Year Plan and praising Stalin as a leader whose achievements “will be seen in history” and who “restored self-respect to a nation of freed slaves”.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning lie

Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his reporting on the implementation of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. In justifying the award, the Pulitzer committee cited his “impartial interpretive reporting” for a series of reports the previous year. The first was a front-page article in the New York Times, which began with the line, “Russia today cannot be judged by Western standards or interpreted in Western terms.”

The New York Times later apologised for publishing Walter Duranty’s articles at the time, but the Pulitzer Committee, despite numerous calls for the Pulitzer to be revoked, refused to do so, even stating in 2003 that it had found “no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate misrepresentation”.

But it should be made clear what Stalin’s plans, called ‘collectivisation’, led to: according to credible estimates, between three and a half and six million Ukrainians and more than a million Russians died. (Some estimates put the total direct and indirect victims of the famine at as many as ten million.) Local and national Communist Party activists went house to house in Ukrainian towns and villages, confiscating food.

Journalist and researcher Anne Applebaum has exhaustively researched this period and in her book The Red Famine she describes the catastrophe that followed. “Farmers had their wheat, their grain, their vegetables, their livestock, everything they had. People were forced to eat mice, rats, leaves, grass. There were even some cases of cannibalism.”

Stalin crushed all nationalist movements in Ukraine through collectivisation and the resulting famine, and paid for his efforts to industrialise the Soviet Union with the confiscated grain he sold abroad. Potential dissidents, especially experts, were arrested and deported by Communist Party officials, and more than 5 000 people were sentenced to death and executed.

Stalin sent the army into the Ukrainian countryside to prevent peasants from leaving their land, which increasingly had nothing left to eat. Stalin responded to pleas for food aid by describing famine as “one of the minor inconveniences of our system”. According to current expert estimates, between 3.5 and 5.5 million people died in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. The consequences of the Holodomor, or famine, are still being felt in Ukraine today, and in this case the term genocide is certainly appropriate.

Duranty wrote news columns for the New York Times throughout this time, in 1932 and 1933, in which he not only denied the facts of the catastrophic famine in Ukraine, but also censored all references to Stalin’s role in the genocide of millions of Ukrainians. He wrote that “the Russian people have an Asian mentality” and therefore “value joint effort and demand autocratic government”. He argued that “individuality and private enterprise are alien concepts that cause social disruption and are as unacceptable to them as tyranny and communism are to the Western world.” That “the unsuccessful attempts to impose Western ideals in Russia from the time of Peter the Great onwards were a form of European colonialism, which was finally swept away by the Revolution of 1917.”

Stalin succeeded where Lenin failed: by intimidation he “restored the dictator of the imperial idea and put himself at the head of the state. Stalin sees himself not as a dictator but as the guardian of the sacred flame.” Duranty called this approach “for want of a better name” Stalinism.

In reality, Stalin was in many respects not fundamentally different from Peter the Great, for he tied the peasants to the land in a way that they had not been tied since the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Only now they were forced to send almost all their produce and food to the government, leaving them with practically nothing.

In June 1932, the Canadian agricultural expert Andrew Cairns reported to the British Foreign Office that he had seen widespread famine while travelling in Russia. “Men, women, children, horses and other labourers are left to die to make the five-year plan succeed, at least on paper,” he wrote, adding that Ukraine, the Caucasus, Crimea and Volga were the worst affected.

But the Soviet authorities stubbornly insisted that there was no famine, and Duranty stood by them, helping his own career by toeing the Party line.

Applebaumova says that despite her long-standing suspicions about Duranty’s motives, she has found no evidence that he was bribed or blackmailed by Russian agents. She also says he did not appear to have been influenced by communism. Instead, Appelbaumova says, “Duranty simply toed the line because it was good for his career – justifying and dismissing the lethality of Stalin’s rule long after it could have been exposed without consequence.”

In 1932, members of the British Embassy met Duranty and were surprised to find that, although he never mentioned the famine in his articles, he was well aware that it was rampant at the time, and at one point he wrote: “There are millions of people in Russia whom the authorities wish to leave destitute for their own safety.”

In December 1932, the Russian government introduced a new passport system which allowed more kulaks to be transported and prevented starving peasants from moving to the cities. In the spring of 1933, it banned those who worked on collective farmland from leaving – essentially trapping everyone who was in the famine zones and condemning them to starvation.

Duranty reported this as good news, again omitting any mention of famine and welcoming Russia’s move to “cleanse the cities of undesirables”. He also refused to report on the famine because he was keen to see America formally recognise the Soviet Union, which, as the record in the Moscow Public Archives testifies, he believed would be “an official tribute to my assessment of the Soviet situation … and might have led to an appointment to a position such as press attaché when the American embassy in Moscow opened.”

In 1933, Stalin praised him, saying that “Duranty is striving to tell the truth about our country.”

Walter Duranty had no interest in anyone outside Russia finding out about the famine, so he went to great lengths to keep it quiet, not only in his own reporting but also in the reporting of others.

Attack on colleagues

In 1933, Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, reporting from the Soviet Union, also spoke out about the famine after walking more than 65 kilometres across Ukraine and interviewing ordinary people. Jones, who had been chosen by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1930 as his foreign affairs adviser, had previously reported from Germany on the rise to power of the Nazi Party and on 23 February 1933 travelled with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels from Leipzig to Frankfurt in a Richthofen trijet, “the fastest and most powerful plane in Germany”, as he wrote, and during the flight was one of the first foreign journalists to interview Hitler. He later wrote in the Welsh newspaper Western Mail that the history of Europe would have been different if the plane had crashed that day.

Jones had visited the Soviet Union twice before, for three weeks in the summer of 1930 and for a month the following summer. Each time he reported his findings and had already written about the starvation of peasants in Soviet Ukraine and southern Russia in an article published in the London Times in October 1931 under the headline “The Real Russia”.

In March 1933 he made a third and final trip to the Soviet Union and on 10 March, thanks to an invitation from Oscar Ehrt, the German Vice-Consul in Kharkov, he managed to travel to the Ukrainian SSR.

However, 65 kilometres before his destination, he got off the train and walked across the border from the Russian SSR into the Ukraine. As he walked through the Ukrainian countryside, he made diary notes about the artificially induced famine he witnessed.

On his return to Berlin on 29 March, he issued a press statement which was subsequently picked up by many European newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian and the New York Evening Post. He wrote: “I walked through many villages and visited twelve collective farms. Everywhere I heard cries of ‘We have no bread. We are starving! Tell England we are starving.’

I walked through the black soil, the so-called Chernozyoma, which used to be the richest arable land in Russia, but now the Communists have banned correspondents from going there, so that they do not see for themselves what is happening.

I spent the night in a village where they used to have two hundred oxen, but now they have six. The peasants were eating animal feed, but even that was only enough for a month. I was told that many had already starved to death. Two soldiers came to arrest a thief. They warned me not to travel at night because ‘there are too many starving and desperate people out there’.

‘We are waiting to die,’ the villagers told me, ‘but, you know, at least we still have some animal fodder. Go further south. They have nothing there. Many houses are empty and people are dead,’ they cried.”

On March thirty-one, 1933, Duranty denied Jones’s testimony in an article for the New York Times. Under the headline “Russians are Hungry but Not Starving”, he wrote that Jones had a “lively and active mind” and that the Welsh journalist’s interviews with people near Kharkov represented “a rather inadequate cross-section of a large country”. He added that he had tried to convince Jones otherwise, but “nothing could shake his conviction of impending doom”. (Jones was killed in Mongolia in 1935 under unclear circumstances. His confrontation with Duranty inspired the 2019 film Mr Jones.)

“Duranty wanted to bring Jones down,” Applebaum says. “And of course he succeeded at the time, because he was the famous Walter Duranty.”

Duranty staunchly defended Stalin and his policies even as famine raged, claiming thousands of victims a day. He used Soviet-approved euphemisms such as “malnutrition” instead of “famine”. In August 1933, he began another article published on the front page of the New York Times by saying, “The excellent harvest that is about to be reaped shows that all reports of famine in Russia today are exaggerations or malicious propaganda.”

He admitted that while Ukraine and other agricultural regions were indeed hit by shortages, “there will be more than enough food to cover national food needs for the coming year and to justify the Kremlin’s collectivisation policy”.

In September 1933, the British diplomat William Strang wrote that Duranty had privately confessed to him that “as many as ten million people have died directly or indirectly during the last year as a result of food shortages”. Duranty never mentioned this estimate in public.

In 1933, Malcolm Muggeridge, a journalist for the Manchester Guardian, also travelled to Ukraine. In her book Stalin’s Apologist, Sally J. Taylor relates that Muggeridge “confirmed the existence of widespread famine as an eyewitness in a series of articles published in the Guardian at the end of March 1933”.

He wrote that the peasantry was starving: “I mean starvation in the absolute sense of the word; not malnutrition, but the fact that for weeks on end they have had almost nothing to eat. This is real,” wrote Muggeridge. “This famine is an organised occupation; worse, a direct war. Not only are entire towns and villages starving to death, but it is being controlled by well-fed Russian soldiers, and the inhabitants are resorting to cannibalism and suicide.”

Reports of the Ukrainian famine also appeared in other European newspapers, such as the Daily Telegraph; Le Matin and Le Figaro; Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Gazette de Lausanne; La Stampa in Italy, Reichpost in Austria. There was also extensive coverage in the American Christian Science Monitor, the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Jewish newspaper Forwaerts. Yet the New York Times’ long-time Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty, a propagandist and apologist for the Communist revolution in Russia in 1917 and later for Stalin and his murderous regime, stood his ground and denied all these reports as fabrications intended to smear the Soviet Union and its Stalinist regime.

He was particularly vehement in his attack on Jones, whom he regarded as his main rival for prestige in journalistic circles. He denied his first-hand testimony and countered it with disinformation. “Since I spoke to Mr Jones,” he wrote, “I have made exhaustive enquiries about this alleged famine. I have made inquiries in Soviet commissariats and in foreign embassies with their network of consuls, and have gathered information from British people working there as experts and from my personal acquaintances, Russian and foreign. All of this seems to me to be more trustworthy information than I could get from a short trip to any area. The Soviet Union is too big to be studied at a glance, and it is the job of the foreign correspondent to present the whole picture and not just a narrow part of it.”

Then he added triumphantly: “And the facts are these: there are indeed food shortages all over the country, sometimes even on well-managed state or collective farms. The big cities and the army are adequately supplied with food. There is no starvation or death from famine, but there is widespread mortality from diseases resulting from malnutrition. In short, in some parts – Ukraine, the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga – the situation is bad, but there is no famine.”

That was a complete lie. In the summer of 1933, the Holodomor reached its peak, with people dying by the thousands every day. But incredibly, on 17 September 1933, Duranty was back in action. In another report from Russia, he assured the readers of the New York Times that all was well in Ukraine and that claims to the contrary were nonsense.

“The writer has just made a 320-kilometre journey by car through the heart of the Ukraine and can say with certainty that the harvest is excellent and that all rumours of famine are ridiculous. Everywhere you go and whoever you talk to – from communists and officials to local farmers – the story is the same: ‘Now everything will be fine, now we are supplied for the winter, now we have more grain than can easily be harvested’.”

But Duranty knew the ugly truth. On 26 September 1933, during a reception at the British Embassy in Moscow, he privately confided to the senior British diplomat William Strang – who had attended every important international meeting as an adviser to the government and had met Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin – that Ukraine was “bleeding to death” and that he believed as many as ten million people had died there, along with other regions, as a result of the collectivisation of agriculture, either directly or indirectly.

In the same breath, Duranty publicly orchestrated a fierce excommunication of those journalists who had risked much by reporting on the brutality of forced collectivisation and the resulting demographic catastrophe, including Muggeridge. Even as the fertile Ukraine, once the breadbasket of Europe, became a modern Golgotha, a place of skulls, Duranty buried the truth underground. He used his much more far-reaching influence in the New York Times to refute Muggeridge’s and Jones’s findings, explaining that there were some deaths from malnutrition-related diseases, but there was no famine, just less food than usual because Stalin’s system of collectivisation had not yet settled down.

“Any report of famine in Russia today is an exaggeration or malicious propaganda,” he said, concluding, “Roughly speaking, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.” In the light of the words of a leading Western correspondent from Russia, Muggeridge and Jones were smeared as liars.

And the New York Times was proud of its Pulitzer Prize-winning “man in Moscow”. Duranty travelled to Washington in the autumn of 1933 as part of the effort to get America to recognise the Soviet Union, and there he enthusiastically told of Russia’s achievements.

Sally J. Taylor, author of Duranty’s biography Stalin’s Apologist, argues that Duranty’s reporting from the USSR was a key factor in US President Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s decision to recognise the Soviet Union. After delicate negotiations, the US formally recognised the Soviet Union on 16 November 1933 and, after almost 16 years, diplomatic relations between the two countries were re-established.

Walter Duranty was praised as the architect of this great achievement. At a gala dinner held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York in honour of Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, the guests politely applauded each of the participants in turn, right up to Duranty’s name. Then, as New Yorker commentator Alexander Woollcott wrote, “the only truly prolonged ovation broke out … One had the impression that America, in a spasm of prudence, had recognized both Russia and Walter Duranty.”

On Christmas Day 1933 Duranty had an interview with Stalin and the dictator congratulated him warmly: “I can say that you bet on our horse to win when others thought he had no chance – and I am sure you have no loss because of that.”

He didn’t. Walter Duranty was not punished for covering up the deaths of millions of people, he was even rewarded for it. The exact number of deaths from the famine remains unclear, but estimates range from 3.5 million to 10 million – as he himself believed. And Duranty’s shameless lies and cover-ups also contributed to this massive loss of life.

Although several governments knew of the atrocities that were taking place, Duranty’s cover-up prevented the public from forcing their countries to intervene, and clouded the already confusing communication between international bodies regarding the Soviet Union.

The prize for lies

Duranty died in 1957. When the Soviet Union collapsed decades later, historians from previously censored archives revealed the full nature of the Ukrainian famine and began to examine in more detail the extent to which Duranty was complicit in this man-made disaster. They also looked at Duranty’s role in deflecting attention from the humanitarian crisis and blaming Stalin.

“He was not only the biggest liar among journalists in Moscow, he was the biggest liar among all the journalists I have met in 50 years of journalism”, said Malcolm Muggeridge in 1982 in an interview for a documentary produced by two Ukrainian-Canadian groups. “Everyone you talked to knew there was a terrible famine going on,” said Muggeridge. “Even in Moscow there was a really bad food shortage.”

Over time, even the New York Times began to assess Duranty’s work more and more scathingly.

In 2003, under public pressure, the newspaper and the Pulitzer Prize committee conducted a parallel review of Duranty’s work and eligibility for the prize. On October 23, 2003, the paper, in an article about itself, reported that “The New York Times has hired a Columbia University history professor to independently assess the reporting of one of our correspondents from the Soviet Union in the 1930s.”

And what were the findings? “In his report to the Times, Professor Mark von Hagen described the reporting for which Mr Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize as ‘tedious and largely uncritical citation of Soviet sources’. This lack of balance and uncritical acceptance of the Soviet justification of a cruel and wasteful regime was a disservice to the American readers of the New York Times and their liberal values, and to the historical experience of the peoples of the Russian and Soviet empires and their struggle for a better life.”

But the Pulitzer committee found “no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate misrepresentation” and decided not to revoke the prize, and the then publisher of the paper, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, said that to withdraw the prize from Duranty’s work would be to purge history – essentially a “Stalinist” approach. (The historian von Hagen, who had been hired by the New York Times as a consultant to evaluate Duranty’s work, publicly denounced this statement, saying that the Pulitzer committee “should, to the greater honour and glory of the New York Times, withdraw the award [from Duranty]. In fact, he has been something of an embarrassment in the history of the New York Times.”)

Bill Keller, who had just become executive editor of the New York Times in 2003, says: “I think the Pulitzer committee’s rationale for not revoking the award is quite flawed. The Pulitzer is a recognition of a journalist’s work, and Duranty’s work was disgraceful.”

At that very time, the New York Times was rocked by several high-profile scandals. Judith Miller, a journalist who reported on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction caches in Iraq, was found to be untrustworthy. Rising star Jayson Blair was found to have fabricated or plagiarised dozens of articles. “The credibility of the paper has been called into question in these cases,” says Keller. “I can imagine that this made it harder to even acknowledge something that was 70 years old. … It was another blow to the credibility of the Times.”

Although Keller says the paper has distanced itself from what Duranty wrote in its pages, the New York Times still lists him among its Pulitzer Prize winners.

But in truth, Duranty was by no means the only black sheep among the foreign correspondents from Moscow. Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University, notes in his book, Bloody Fields – Europe between Hitler and Stalin, that most journalists in Moscow knew about the mass famine that was taking place.

“The basic facts of mass starvation and death, while occasionally reported by the European and American press, never received the clarity of an indisputable event. Almost no one has claimed that Stalin deliberately starved the Ukrainians to death. Although journalists knew less than diplomats, most of them understood that millions were starving to death.”

We can only hope that more journalists will realise the responsibility of their profession, despite the undeniable burdens it carries, and will do their job with credibility – even if it means incurring the wrath of a dictator.