A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New York Times, Walter Duranty, covered up one of the worst genocides in modern history. The atrocity I’m referring to is the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 that was orchestrated by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. It killed an estimated 7 to 10 million people.
Walter Duranty is now viewed as a Stalin-apologist who turned out copy largely regarded as Soviet propaganda.
British-born Duranty had been The New York Times’s man in Moscow from 1922 to 1936, during which he interviewed Stalin twice. For a series of reports he wrote about the Soviet Union in 1931, he was even awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Walter Duranty was given the award in 1932, the year the famine began.
Known to the Ukrainians as the Holodomor, “murder by famine,” it is one of the least known genocides in modern history, but it is one now recognized by 24 countries, including Australia and Canada. The famine was used as a weapon of war by Stalin to wipe out Ukrainian peasants who opposed his goals of collectivization
One of the reasons why this atrocity remains widely unknown by the general public has to do with the deliberate dishonesty of certain Western journalists at the time, such as Walter Duranty.
“[Duranty] was of course not only the greatest liar among the journalists in Moscow, but he is the greatest liar of any journalist I have ever met in 50 years of journalism,” said British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who was one of the few who honestly reported on the famine in Ukraine.
“We used to wonder whether in fact that the authorities has some kind of hold over him because he so utterly played their game. But it didn’t worry The New York Times who featured his reports,” said Muggeridge in the video further below.
Muggeridge said Duranty’s reporting on the famine in Ukraine was “particularly disgraceful” because he denied its existence.
One subhead of one of Walter Duranty’s New York Times’ articles said boldly that people were “well nourished” and that “children are enthusiastic.”
Through some of his articles, Walter Duranty also tried to discredit journalists, such as Muggeridge and Gareth Jones of Wales, who exposed what was occurring in Ukraine.
Duranty labeled such articles as “exaggerated or malignant propaganda.” Reports of famine he said were “ridiculous.”
