Existing comment:
The Holodomor:
A Genocide-Famine
The Ukrainian word "holodomor" translates loosely to "kill by hunger." In June 1933, at the height of the genocide-famine, the death rate in Ukraine reached 34,560 people a day, 1,440 people an hour, 24 people every minute. At least 3.9 million victims died of starvation and related causes.
This manmade famine was part of a larger effort to destroy traditional Ukrainian cultural, national, and religious loyalties to make way for a new Soviet identity and allegiance to the USSR. As the famine decimated Ukraine, the Soviet regime dismantled the Ukrainian Church and exiled or executed the republic's intellectuals and politicians.
To undercut rumors and a few chilling eyewitness reports of mass starvation, the Soviet government repeatedly dismissed famine claims as greatly exaggerated. Western journalists -- most notoriously Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Walter Duranty -- spread this disinformation to their audiences, stifling calls for famine relief from outside the Soviet Union.
Walter Duranty
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Walter Duranty (May 25, 1884 – October 3, 1957) was a Liverpool born Anglo-American journalist who served as the Moscow Bureau Chief of The New York Times for fourteen years (1922–1936) following the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–1921).
In 1932 Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize for a series of reports about the Soviet Union, eleven of which were published in June 1931. He was criticized for his subsequent denial of widespread famine (1932–1933) in the USSR, most particularly the famine in Ukraine. Years later, there were calls to revoke his Pulitzer. In 1990, The New York Times, which submitted his works for the prize in 1932, wrote that his later articles denying the famine constituted "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." ...
Reporting the 1932–1933 famine
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.)
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 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." 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."
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."
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. |