STALIN & FDR's TRIUMVIRATE OF STOOGES

We are determined that nothing shall stop us from sharing with you all that we have … Generations unborn will owe a great measure of freedom to the unconquerable power of the Soviet people. Harry Hopkins, Madison Square Garden Speech (Quoted from, Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia, Penguin, 2008, 284)

Stalin gives the impression of a strong mind which is composed and wise.  His grown eyes are exceedingly kind and gentle.  A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him. …  A wonderful and stimulating experiment is taking place in the Soviet Union…  The Soviet Union is doing wonderful things… Joseph Davies (Quoted from The Forsaken, 120, 142)

Henry Wallace is a pacifist, a dreamer who wants to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic secrets, and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politburo.

Harry Truman on Henry Wallace (Quoted from The Forsaken, 279) 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt died seventy-two years ago two months after returning from his grueling journey to Yalta. With considerable unease one contemplates the famous photographs of a grey and gaunt FDR sitting between Churchill and Stalin, staring back at the camera with ghostly eyes sunken and lost, a dark cloak wrapped around his frail body.  Captured on film is a spent man leaning on death’s door doing exactly what? – negotiating the fate of millions of people with one of the 20^th century’s most cunning, deceitful and brutal personalities. Off to the side and out of camera range, providing counsel and support was ... Alger Hiss.

FDR is the closest thing Americans have to a modern, secular saint, the man who guided America through the Great Depression and saved the world from Adolf Hitler. His reputation is guarded by an impenetrable protective halo, the greatness and heroism of his Presidency forever guaranteed. To speak disparagingly of FDR puts one on the fringe. 

FDR’s halo shines particularly bright for Democrats for whom there is no higher praise in the political arena than to be likened in any way to the 32^nd President of the United States. Shortly after the 2008 election, Time magazine’s cover featured an eye-popping photo-shopped picture of President-elect Barack Obama accoutered in a signature FDR pose, teeth clenching the cigarette holder at a jaunty angle punctuating a broad, confident grin, head topped with the well-recognized fedora, perched casually behind the wheel of an open 1930s convertible ready, so to speak, to steer America out of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Under the picture was the caption, “The New New Deal.”     

Eight years later with the vapors of Obama-mania long dissipated, a stagnant economy unemployment rate the new norm, and “Hope & Change” a forgotten campaign inanity, no one should confuse the  President with the 32nd, at least as secular saint. Obama’s descent from the state of his 2008 divinity (“He is sort of a God….” Evan Thomas, Newsweek) to fallible flesh is easily explained and sadly understood. But the continued awe and reverence for Franklin Roosevelt, entrenched and undeniable as it is, is somewhat harder to comprehend.

   

Whether FDR’s policies prolonged the Great Depression remains an extremely involved and complicated historical-political debate and his legacy and reputation in some relative sense rise and fall with the movement of that controversy. However, with the availability of primary source material in the form of declassified official U.S. documents and material from the former Soviet Union archives, FDR’s formulation and conduct of American foreign policy up to and including World War II must be judged as nothing less than a monumental disaster.  His terrible judgment and decisions with in dealing with Stalin and the Soviet Union condemned tens of millions of people to decades of servitude and tyranny.        

The premises for making this case can be stated in two simple sentences, their truth, well documented and indisputable.

Joseph Stalin is one of history’s most brutal, lethal dictators.

FDR trusted Stalin as a decent, honorable man.

Once the God of the Communist world was finally and safely dead in March 1953 even his own protégés after a respectable time denounced him and evicted him from the mausoleum on Red Square.  Thanks to the great pioneering work of historians like Robert Conquest, later confirmed by opening of Soviet archives, we all know that Stalin was one of the most prolific mass-murderers in history, surpassing in sheer numbers his partner in the rape of Poland from 1939-1941, Adolf Hitler.  Moreover, while Hitler’s homicidal designs were focused primarily on Jews, Stalin’s terror-command state cut a much wider swath, was of a longer duration and spawned prolifically lethal emulators like Mao, Kim Il Sung and Pol Pot.    

It was FDR’s government, considerably influenced by the scurrilous, lying New York Times journalist Walter Duranty, which gave diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in 1933. This was just the time when Stalin’s cadres were en masse forcibly extracting grain from the farmers in Ukraine. Stalin needed hard currency in order to capitalize Soviet industries through grain sales on the international markets. The result was mass-starvation, a terror-famine, as Conquest called it, which killed millions of Ukrainians including women and children. Driven to insanity by their savage hunger the Ukrainians began eating grass, bark, dirt and finally each other.  Country roadsides were littered with wasted corpses while the communist-guarded granaries were filled and readied for export.**  At that time there were from the outside a few witnesses to Holodomor, the Ukrainian word for the Stalin-made holocaust. Truth-tellers like Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge observed the starvation first hand and tried to tell the world, but the “blind-eye” was FDR’s preferred modus vivendi for the Soviet Union with the assist of organs like the New York Times and, even worse, with close personal advisors who assiduously enabled FDR’s view of Stalin as a tough but trustworthy sort of guy who only wanted the best for his own people.

In 1943 William Bullitt, the first U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1933-1936), a man who had had extensive first-hand experience with Soviet diplomacy and all of its duplicity and treachery tried to disabuse FDR of his benign view of Stalin. According to Bullitt’s memoirs FDR’s response was:

Bill, I don’t dispute the logic of your reasoning. I have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of a man.  Harry says he’s not and that he doesn’t want anything in the world but security for his country, and I think if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.***

One could not imagine a more stunning and jaw-dropping revelation of an utterly willful, delusional mind. A “hunch” no less that trumped more than a decade of evidence of systematic tyranny and perfidy on an unprecedented scale. The “Harry” in this retort was, of course, Harry Hopkins, who was FDR’s “White House live-in” chief foreign policy advisor during WWII.  It is difficult to know with complete certainty if Hopkins was a Soviet agent or merely a dupe. In her book, American Betrayal, Diana West makes a strong and compelling case for the former.  In any case, Hopkins’s approach to Stalin, which also became FDR’s, was open-ended, obliging, obsequious, admiring even. Hopkins encouraged FDR to open wide the spigots of Lend Lease, and … to ask in return?  Not much. At least this is what the President seemed to think.  In return, so the “reasoning” went, Stalin would like him. Whether or not Stalin liked anyone, we know for a fact that close proximity to him was frequently lethal, as his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Nikolai Bukharin, and many of his old Bolshevik colleagues discovered. The Studebaker trucks, heavy machinery and materials that FDR was sending to the Soviets to help them fight the Germans were also deployed in the Stalin’s Gulag to transport and maintain the slaves.       

The ambassador who replaced William Bullitt in Moscow was none other than Joseph Davies who, shortly after his arrival observed the first of three major Stalin-choreographed show trials and to the amazement of his own staff, including George Kennan, put his imprimatur on the farce.*  Much was made in the international press coverage of the high U.S. diplomatic presence at the trial, a legitimizing touch greatly appreciated by Stalin.* Davies spent the three years of his ambassadorial assignment fawning over and patronizing Stalin who was at the very time conducting a reign of terror that decimated the leadership of his own party and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people.  His own wife, Marjorie Merriweather Post, years after her return to the U.S., reported hearing from the windows of her Moscow apartment the screams of the victims being carried off late at night by the NKVD.*    

At this same time a heartbeat away from the Presidency was another Stalin-o-phile, Vice President Henry Wallace. Wallace’s contribution to U.S. Soviet foreign policy and to FDR’s fantasy view of Stalin was to treck through the Gulag and render high praise for healthy, hardy “pioneers’ mining the gold and cutting the timber in Siberia.  “There are no more similar countries in the world than the Soviet Union and the United States of America,” enthused Wallace.  “Free people, born on free expanses, can never live in slavery.”* After his NKVD-managed 25 day tour of the vast Gulag slave colony, Wallace sent an open letter addressed to Comrade J.V. Stalin to convey his “deep gratitude for the splendid cordial hospitality shown to me.”* Stalin was nothing if not cordial and hospitable, especially to gullible, hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, American politicians who would wildly rave about their Potemkin excursions and tell everyone back home how just how swell things were for the lunch pail gang in the Socialist Workers' Paradise.     

We now remember Stalin for his masterminding and executing of three monumental works of mass murder and slavery: the terror-famine, a holocaust claiming millions of victims; the terror-purge of 1936-38 that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people; and the Gulag, Stalin’s slave-empire, a hellish, murderous prison system, purposely designed and operated so as to subject his own people by the millions to maximum suffering and degradation and to forcibly extract as much labor from them as possible while simultaneously turning them into corpses.

But we should also remember that in these efforts, Stalin had the support and assistance of a triumvirate of stooges, Hopkins, Davies and Wallace, men who looked the other way, men who worked to provide American aide and assistance to  Stalin far beyond what he needed to fight off his former partner in depredation, Hitler. Wallace journeyed though the Gulag and managed to remain tenaciously oblivious to its reality. Davies sat in a front row seat in the Hall of Mirrors observing the Show Trials, yet somehow, like Wallace trooping through Kolyma missed its obvious features and purpose. Hopkins shuttled back and forth between Stalin and FDR, working tirelessly to give Stalin everything he wanted, eyes tightly closed to the many scenes and ample evidence of some of the worst atrocities in modern times.      

For FDR it is time to take him down from the pedestal and drop the reverence, time to look long and hard at the fools and Quislings he installed in high places and trusted. It is also time to write history that speaks forthrightly to his determined, invincible ignorance with regard to all things Russian. In the face of overwhelming evidence of Soviet finger prints on the 1940 Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers in Smolensk, FDR preferred to echo Stalin’s version. “[T]his is entirely German propaganda and a German plot.  I am absolutely convinced that the Russians did not do this.” *** He seemed to be “absolutely convinced” of many things that turned out to be the opposite of the way they actually were which means that his judgment was deeply flawed and that his decisions were tragic.  One does wonder if FDR had lived to see the fate of the Poles, the Baltic people, and the rest of the European countries that fell into the Soviet maw: would his ignorance and arrogance turned to regret?

_________________________________________

*See, Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: an American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia, Penguin, 2008

**See, Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, Oxford, 1986.

***Quoted from Diana West, American Betrayal, the Secret Assault on our Nation’s Character, St. Martins, 2013, 199, 212
Kudos to Tim Tzouliadis and Diana West for their significant work on FDR's stooges.

Walter Duranty, Joseph Stalin & the New York Times: Demand for an Apology

The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weaker man with the sponge. First, the criminal who slays, then the sophist who defends the slayer. 

                                                                                                      Lord Acton

There is no famine, nor is there likely to be. 

                                                                         Walter Duranty

Out of the turbulent history of twentieth-century Communism the lives and careers of three men immerge as perhaps the most important, the most dominating of the many Communist revolutionaries who rose to high positions of power: Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung and Fidel Castro.  The continuous span of time that marked their rule began in the mid-1920s, when Lenin died and Stalin consolidated his own power within the party, and covers close to ninety years. Fidel Castro, now in his dotage, ruled for over half a century.  His geriatric regime staggered into the twenty-first century with his younger brother Raul in his late 70s, the faithful custodian of “The Revolution.”

The first two men, Stalin and Mao, imposed their will and stamped the pathologies of their ruthless personalities upon the peoples of the two largest countries in the world. The changes that they initiated and presided over during their rule were staggering, far reaching and monumental. The third, Fidel Castro was only thirty-three when he and his even younger followers swept the corrupt Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959.  Castro created and skillfully marketed his own distinct counter-culture image of Latin American Communism, infused with a heavy load of anti-Americanism, then exported it with great success world-wide. This small island nation, wrested from Spain by U.S. troops sixty years earlier, had been a playground paradise for the U.S. Yet, Castro somehow managed to turn himself and Cuba into powerful symbols.  He  was a young Communist David standing up to the Capitalist U.S. Goliath, hovering only ninety miles away, menacing yet inhibited, somehow intimidated by the righteousness of Cuban egalitarianism.  The success of Castro in the early stages was greatly assisted by President Kennedy’s bungling of the Bay of Pigs invasion within months of his inauguration in 1961.  Castro then connived with the Soviet Union to arm Cuba with nuclear missiles pointed at U.S. cities.  This small island nation in the 1960s he then put at the epicenter of a Communist-Free World superpower stand-off that nearly brought about a modern Armageddon.

            Castro’s reaction during the Cuban missile crises reminds one of the comments of Mao’s cavalier dismissal of the potential Chinese casualties from a nuclear war with the U.S. – as it is reported that he was furious that Khrushchev had given way to Kennedy’s threats.  Castro had wanted and urged a Soviet-U.S. conflagration knowing that massive Cuban casualties would have likely resulted. “Castro acknowledged that he had encouraged Khrushchev not to back down, and he was prepared to provoke a shooting war that would have undoubtedly sacrificed untold numbers of Cubans.” [Anthony DePalma, The Man who Invented Fidel, Perseus, 2006, 207] Castro had actually wanted war.  Like Mao, the well-being of his own people, not to mention innocents from abroad, meant little to him. The potential massive destruction and loss of life of the Cubans was incidental to his own sense of self-importance and his fixation on ideology and power.  He told a group of students at the University of Havana a few days later that “Khrushchev had no balls.” (“no cojones”) [DePalma, The Man who Invented Fidel, 208]

            Stalin, Mao, and Castro – each of these men was a master image maker, a cynical treacherous manipulator within his own party, and a veritable genius of self-promotion and political self-preservation.  For decades each one presided over a brutal, repressive single-party police state, yet was worshiped at home as a near god, a man of incomparable wisdom, selfless devotion to the people and limitless benevolence.  Abroad each one attracted large numbers of devoted followers and commanded the admiration and acclamation of the intellectual class. 

Each of these three men owed a great debt of gratitude to a prominent journalist from the West who for each one created and presented to the outside world a softened and idealized image.  Those images grossly belied their megalomaniacal personalities and were above all else false and distorted.  The widely acclaimed books, newspaper and journal articles that they would write about Stalin, Mao, and Castro would help to shape public opinion, influence foreign policy and, ultimately, make it easier for each of these dictators to remain in power and to oppress and terrorize their own people for decades.

Walter Duranty, Edgar Snow, and Herbert L. Matthews – each one of these men in a unique way played the role of Lord Acton’s “sophist”, defending their strongman patron “slayers with the sponge.”  The debt owed to each of these three sophists was indeed recognized by the strongmen whom they lionized and defended. So pleased was Stalin by Duranty’s journalist work for the New York Times that he presented him with the Order of Lenin. [Peter Paluch, “Harvesting Despair: Spiking the Ukrainian Famine Again,” New Republic, April, 11, 1986, 34]  Half of Edgar Snow's remains rest on the campus of Peking University, Beijing, alongside Weiming Lake, in a place of honor in the country where millions of people died because of the rule of a man he lionized in his books and articles. In 1960 when Castro visited the U.S. he met with Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times.  Praising Herbert Matthews and the Times editors,“Without your help,” Castro said, “the revolution in Cuba would never have been.”  [DePalma, The Man who Invented Fidel, 158]  Matthews’ biographer writes that Matthews is still to this day a hero in Cuba.   “Besides being enshrined in the museum [the National Museum of the Revolution in what was Batista’s Presidential Palace in Havana], Matthews is honored in the old hotel Sevilla where he stayed before heading into the Sierra.”  [DePalma, The Man who Invented Fidel, 278]   Duranty, Snow and Matthews – each one had been praised and rewarded by his patron for the assistance and services they had performed. 

Walther Duranty, a British born journalist, served as the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times from 1922 through 1936. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for 13 articles written in 1931 and published in the New York Times analyzing the Soviet Union under Stalin’s leadership.  In the New York Times executive offices hallway where over 80 portraits of Pulitzer Prize winners hang, including that of Duranty with the inscription that the award recognized “a profound and intimate comprehension of conditions in Russia [consistent with] the best type of foreign correspondence.”  [Douglas McCollam, CJR, November/December, 2003, 43]

But beside Duranty’s portrait is attached a note, “Other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage.” [McCollam, CJR, 43] What then does this ying-of-praise, yang-of-repudiation mean? If “discredited,” then why are his photograph and inscription still in a place of honor? Duranty seems to hang in the Times hallway in a kind of limbo.  Kindly stated, Duranty’s work as a journalist was badly tainted, and the awarding of his prize was no less than a travesty.   It is difficult to overstate how unfortunate it was that a man of Duranty’s character and personality defects was to be misjudged as a superior talent and to be placed in a position to report on and influence opinion on momentous historical events that shaped the history of the twentieth century and affected the lives of so many people.  

In 1990 thirty-three years after Duranty’s death, J.S. Taylor published a biography of Duranty entitled, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Time’s Man in Moscow.  The title could not be more apropos. Indeed, Duranty served the Kremlin chief especially well, helping him to cover up from the outside world knowledge of the famine that Stalin had deliberately created and imposed on Ukraine in the early 1930s. Duranty, though not in the governing inner-circle, exhibited some of the same qualities of character as Stalin’s men, namely a lack of any moral principle and a dedication to self-advancement.  In his Camrades: a Brief History of Communism, Robert Service writes that Duranty “was shameless, someone who would say anything that would prolong his comfort and his commercial activity in the USSR.” [Robert Service, Camaradas: Breve Historia del Comunismo, 294]   

Duranty also witnessed Stalin’s show trials in the mid-1930s in Moscow. He drew from his extensive Russian expertise and experience and confidently declared to The New Republic after observing the 1937 trial that he found the confessions of the defendants to be credible.  [S.J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s Man in Moscow, Oxford, 1990, 267]  Throughout the rest of the 1930s and into the 1940s Duranty followed and reported on the show trials for his western readers. Duranty’s rendering of the proceedings was essentially a vindication for Stalin as well as a rationalization of their obvious irregularities.  Duranty published in 1941 The Kremlin and the People, a book in which he put forth his “Fifth Column” thesis, arguing that the Soviet leadership had indeed been infiltrated by saboteurs and traitors – which was Stalin’s own version – and that while there were excesses and abuses of what by Western standards would be due process, the trials on the whole were necessary in order for the Soviet Union to purge itself of traitorous elements before it entered into war.  [Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, Oxford, 1990, 269-70]  Duranty also downplayed the number of casualties from the Great Purges of 1936-1939. [Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 271]   

The famine and its devastating effects that Duranty helped Stalin to conceal from the outside world plunged three to seven million people into starvation, depending on varying accounts. “There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition, especially in the Ukraine, North Caucasus and Lower Volga” Duranty had written in 1933 at the time when people were starving by the millions. [Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 207]   No exact count is possible, the Soviet census compilers who took the initial counts after the famine was done were ordered by Stalin to be shot, presumably because their numbers were too accurate and pointed toward the ugly truth of what happened.

The famine was a horrific piece of mass murder that continues to stagger the imagination in the cold blooded calculation of its planning, its massive dimensions and its merciless ferocity. A human catastrophe of this magnitude, one would think, would not be that easy to cover up.  But Stalin was also extremely good at that as well. Malcolm Muggeridge, who traveled to Ukraine in 1933 after developing a suspicion of what was happening to the peasants, became one of the few outside direct eye witnesses.   It was, he said, “one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe that it ever happened.” [Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 206]  In recompense for his efforts to tell the outside world what was happening inside Stalin’s new society Muggeridge was vilified and then blackballed as a journalist.  His own wife’s aunt, the Stalin-smitten, Fabian Socialist, Beatrice Webb sneeringly dismissed his reports as “a hysterical tirade.” [Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 206] By telling the world what Stalin’s policies and his cadres were actually doing to the people they ruled over Muggeridge had fallen afoul of Britain’s powerful opinion-shaping Left.  He became a persona non gratia and could no longer get work as a journalist. [Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 206]]

The famine, as Peter Paluch points out, was the first of its kind in modern history, a “famine on command”, brought about not by drought, crop failure or war.  “One hundred thousand Communist party activists, brought in for the task from Russia, physically removed virtually all of the food from the region.” [Paluch,   “Harvesting Despair, 33]  Thirty years later Mao would undertake a similar approach with a similar outcome, and, like Stalin, he would have an obsequious retinue of prominent Western observers on hand to tell the outside world that all was well.

 Duranty not only reported the famine to his western readers in euphemistic and misleading terms, he took the lead in discrediting the report of Gareth Jones, a fellow Brit who on a three week walking trip through Ukraine reported the extensive starvation that he had personally witnessed.  Duranty apparently worried about falling out of favor with the Soviet censors and denied access to the high profile Metro-Vickers trial if the Jones reports were not repudiated.  [Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 207]  Gareth Jones, the amateur truth-teller, was no match for the “professional” Walter Duranty who was able to discredit him, the result of which was that Jones’s direct observations of one of the worst atrocities of the modern world were ignored and lost.  “‘Throwing down Jones’” signaled one of the sorriest periods of reportage in the history of the free press, one in which Walter Duranty led the way – with the others in the pack all not that far behind.” [Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 209]  

Duranty deceived his Western readers for years.  He devoted his skills to the  crafting of  a false image of the Soviet Union and above all, of Stalin, someone  whose obvious crudeness and brutality could be excused as the darker side of a great and determined man whose better instincts were focused on the advancing the well being of toiling working class whose interests he claimed to represent.  In Moscow in the very early days of the Bolshevik regime Duranty continued his “cunning Machiavellian reporting” that his reporter colleague, George Seldes of the Chicago Tribute attributed to him. [Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 110]  Duranty failed to report the execution of Vicar General of the Catholic Church. 

 Like Stalin, Duranty was highly talented liar with lying deeply embedded in his character. His personal history reveals a man dissolute and largely devoid of personal morals. His long public career as a supposedly truth telling reporter was built upon the selling of lies on a very grand scale to many people.  Muggeridge later in his life referred to Duranty as “the greatest liar I have ever met in fifty years of journalism,” and Joseph Alsop called him a “fashionable prostitute” who served the communists.  [McCollam, CJR, 45]

Unlike Stalin, Duranty was a journalist. He practiced a profession which at its core is supposed to be about telling the truth to others about important events they are not in a position to directly observe or judge.  The normative assumption is that the journalist operates independently of wielders of political power and exercises a kind of moral oversight in the form of an observer and reporter of events who has no vested interest in misrepresenting them.  One may not recoil much from hearing an accusation of a lying from a politician, much less a dictator, since it is both fairly commonplace and predictable. But a lying journalist is different matter. The lies of a journalist are a betrayal of trust, a complete abdication of professional responsibility which in the modern world is viewed as a constraint on the abuse of power and privilege. The lying journalist is a betrayer of the worst kind.

Duranty emerges as a familiar type of reprehensible public figure in the twentieth century.  There were others who followed in his wake, of particular note, Edgar Snow and Herbert L. Matthews.  Strong criminal men of action, like Stalin, Mao and Castro in an age of mass communication, need the weaker men of words, the sponges, to wipe away and hide from view the blood, the depredations and the crimes.  Stalin had many of these weaker men in tow, the intellectual sycophants who defended and praised him.  But Duranty is in many ways a special case.  For one thing, he was a westerner outside of Stalin’s orbit of direct power or control.  This alone, however, did not make him special or unique.  There were a lot of sophisticated admirers and adulators from the West like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells who came away from visits with Stalin entranced and full of praise. But Duranty did something far worse.  He represented one of the most prestigious, influential and authoritative newspapers in the Western world, and he was charged with reporting to his readers the truth on a newly developing social order, one touted by its leaders to be far superior to anything past or present. Duranty, however, chose both to lie about what he witnessed.  Even worse he attacked and defamed those who did tell the truth.  Moreover, the lies he told deprived millions of his readers in the West of awareness of the real facts and the crucial knowledge of the monstrous nature of the Stalinist regime.  Duranty’s journalistic writings helped mightily to shape in the West an appallingly soft and naïve view of Soviet Communism and a sympathetic if not favorable view of Stalin.  Duranty also labored on behalf of the USSR to obtain diplomatic recognition from the U.S.  For this massive and highly consequential performance of sycophancy and dishonesty, Duranty was bestowed with praise and awarded the highest prize of his profession, the Pulitzer, one which to this day has not been revoked.  The New York Times, from Stalin to Castro to Ho Chi Minh has been consistently an apologist and special pleader for Communist tyrants.

Emerging from his biography is the portrait of a man whose character was deeply steeped in dishonesty. Duranty early in his career worked for the New York Times as reporter in France during WWI.   “He was more writer than reporter. Whatever happened, Duranty would somehow convert it into a good story.  And there would always be that mingling of truth and the elements of fiction in his work, a certain liberty—poetic license, if you will—more interpretative, less objective, at times, some would say, fatally flawed by constant wavering and equivocation.” [Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 48]

Duranty‘s personal dishonesty is well documented. His rejection and shabby treatment of his family members he covered up in his autobiography Search for a Key by a fiction: he was, he wrote, orphaned as an only child at ten by a railway accident that killed his parents.  This relieved him, as his biographer notes, of any “unwelcoming questions” about his mother and sister whom he dropped from his life and ignored in the last days of their lives. [Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 27]  Duranty also lied about his opium addiction in his autobiography saying that it began after his accident that took his leg, and that he began using opium to cope with the pain, when in fact he had used opium as a recreational drug much earlier in his life and with considerable frequency. [FN Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 31-32]

Duranty did not so much seem to be ideologue as he was a nihilist and an opportunist. A cynical, self-promoter, he impressed those around him as a man who did not seem to believe much in anything.  “The deeply held moral convictions of other men,” writes his biographer, “served only to make Duranty uncomfortable, and he liked to believe he was better than they were because he was free from the bonds that tied their hands.” [Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 232]

 In summing up Duranty’s performance as a journalist his biographer writes: “The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 remains the greatest man-made disaster ever recorded, exceeding in scale even the Jewish Holocaust of the next decade. It was Walter Duranty’s destiny to become, in effect, the symbol for the West’s failure to recognize and understand it at the time.” [Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 239-240]  True, but the fact that Duranty’s photo still hangs in halls of the New York Times and that the Ukrainian famine still nearly 80 years later remains a historical episode of little note and attention, suggests that Duranty’s complicity in covering it up  was a piece of a much larger and continuing moral failure of the West.  Moreover, the New York Times bears some responsibility for what Duranty did. “Researchers who have investigated Duranty’s career have found that certain editors at the New York Times did have doubts about his [Duranty’s] coverage of the Soviet Union and never acted to recall him.” [McCollam, CJR, 47]  Duranty’s exposure as a compulsive liar and a self-promoting degenerate decades after his death is too little too late.  His photo still hangs in the Times gallery.  We now live in a time where the demand is high for “apologies” to be given by the heirs of offending groups to the descendants of wronged groups.  Perhaps the New York Times ownership should issue a formal, public apology to the people of Ukraine for helping to hid from the outside world the truth of the mass murder Stalin inflicted on them.