Times Lied, Millions Died

National Review Online, November 24, 2003

So that's it then. Despite all the protests, the Pulitzer Prize board has decided that it will not revoke the award won by Walter Duranty of the New York Times for his reporting in Stalin's Soviet Union. This was not a decision that it took lightly, mind you. The board's members want everyone to understand that they only took their decision after "more than six months of study and deliberation." Six months — that's around one month, perhaps less, for each million who died in the holodomor, the man-made famine that Duranty tried so hard to deny. Here's how Petro Solovyschuk from the Ukraine's Vinnytsia region remembers that time:

I no longer lived in my house. I slept in patches of clover, in haystacks; I was swollen from hunger, my clothes were in shreds. Our house was torn down and they took everything to the collective farm. Only a pile of clay remained. And there is no trace of my family — not a grave, nor a cross. There are only these names: my father — Makar Solovyschuk, died May 1933; my mother — Oliana Solovyschuk, died March 1933; my brother — Ivan Solovyschuk, died April 1933; my sister — Motrya Solovyschuk, died April 1933.

Here's what Walter Duranty said in June of that year: "The 'famine' is mostly bunk."

To be fair, the board's argument is not without some logic.

In recent months, much attention has been paid to Mr. Duranty's dispatches regarding the famine in the Soviet Union in 1932-1933, which have been criticized as gravely defective. However, a Pulitzer Prize for reporting is awarded not for the author's body of work or for the author's character but for the specific pieces entered in the competition. Therefore, the Board focused its attention on the 13 articles that actually won the prize, articles written and published during 1931...In its review of the 13 articles, the Board determined that Mr. Duranty's 1931 work, measured by today's standards for foreign reporting, fall seriously short....

But what can the board mean by "today's" standards? The distortions, cursory research, and rehashed propaganda that characterized so much of Duranty's work even prior to the famine were a disgrace to journalism — then just as much as now.

The board adds that there was "not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case. Revoking a prize 71 years after it was awarded under different circumstances, when all principals are dead and unable to respond, would be a momentous step and therefore would have to rise to that standard."

Quite how those circumstances are "different" isn't explained. Are we meant to believe that it was perhaps reasonable in those days to expect that the Five-Year Plan would be buttressed by a Pulitzer Prize-winning lie or two? The board does not say. As for trying to justify its inaction on the grounds that "all the principals are dead and unable to respond," let's just say that's an unfortunate choice of words in the context of a horror that left five, six or seven million (Khrushchev: "No one was counting") dead and, thus, one might agree, "unable to respond."

But the argument (with which I have some sympathy) that, however repellent they were, the events of 1932-33 should be irrelevant in considering a prize won for writings that predate them, can only be taken so far. Duranty's behavior in those later years is certainly relevant in coming to an assessment as to whether the flaws in his prizewinning work were the product of a deliberate piece of deception. And the evidence from 1933 is clear. Duranty was a liar. And if he was a liar in 1933, it's probable that he was a liar in 1931.

To make things worse, not only may Duranty have been lying, but also the New York Times may have known that he was lying. One historian has pointed to State Department papers recording a 1931 (note the date) conversation between Duranty and a U.S. diplomat in Berlin suggesting that there was an "understanding" between the New York Times and the Soviet authorities that Duranty's dispatches always reflected the official opinion of the Soviet regime rather than his own point of view.

Now, Duranty could have been lying about that too, or the diplomat could have misunderstood what he was being told, but, like so much of this story, it raises issues that need airing in something more than one brief press release. As the body responsible for administering journalism's most prestigious prize, the Pulitzer board ought to be advocates of openness and disclosure. We are told that it considered this matter for over six months of "study and deliberation." Assuming this is true, the board should publish its findings in full.

But if the Pulitzer Prize board can, in theory at least, make a respectable case for leaving the prize in Hell with Duranty's ghost, the New York Times, usually so exquisitely sensitive to the injustices of the past, is on less certain ground. To be sure, over time it has distanced itself from its former Moscow correspondent, but not (apart for some rather feeble cosmetic gestures) from his Pulitzer.

In response to the latest campaign to revoke the prize, earlier this year the New York Times commissioned Columbia University history professor Mark von Hagen to review Duranty's work. He turned out to be no fan of a man who, the New York Times once said, had been on perhaps "the most important assignment ever entrusted by a newspaper to a single correspondent over a considerable period of time." In the report, von Hagen describes Duranty's work from 1931, for example, as a "dull and largely uncritical" recitation of Soviet sources, but the report itself contains no final recommendation. Subsequently, however, von Hagen has argued that the prize should be withdrawn for the sake of the gray lady's "honor."

Honor? Well, when it comes to accepting responsibility for Duranty, the New York Times (usually so eager to be seen as being on the side of the angels) has always tended to be a little reticent, so perhaps it is no surprise that its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., seemed a touch unwilling to go quite as far as his historian. Oh yes, he did what he had to. He dutifully forwarded von Hagen's report to the Pulitzer board. He even sent a cover letter with it in which he condescended to "respect" whatever the board might choose to decide, but he just couldn't resist adding the thought that rescinding Duranty's prize evoked the old Stalinist practice of "airbrush[ing] purged figures out of official records and histories," a view, interestingly, that von Hagen does not share.

Sadly for Pinch and his paper, any airbrushing would likely to be ineffective anyway. Whatever was finally decided, the controversies of recent years have ensured that the historical record will always be clear. The 1932 Pulitzer, the prize about which the New York Times was so proud for so long, was won by a liar and a fraud, won by a journalist to whom genocide was not news that was fit to print, won by a journalist who by his silence made his newspaper an accomplice to mass murder.

If I were Arthur Sulzberger Jr., I would have begged them to take that prize away.

Prize Specimen

National Review Online, May 7, 2003

We will never know how many Ukrainians died in Stalin's famines of the early 1930s. As Nikita Khrushchev later recalled, "No one was keeping count." Writing back in the mid- 1980s, historian Robert Conquest came up with a death toll of around six million, a calculation not so inconsistent with later research (the writers of The Black Book of Communism (1999) estimated a total of four million for 1933 alone). Four million, six million, seven million, when the numbers are this grotesque does the exact figure matter? Just remember this instead:

The first family to die was the Rafalyks — father, mother and a child. Later on the Fediy family of five also perished of starvation. Then followed the families of Prokhar Lytvyn (four persons), Fedir Hontowy (three persons), Samson Fediy (three persons). The second child of the latter family was beaten to death on somebody's onion patch. Mykola and Larion Fediy died, followed by Andrew Fediy and his wife; Stefan Fediy; Anton Fediy, his wife and four children (his two other little girls survived); Boris Fediy, his wife and three children: Olanviy Fediy and his wife; Taras Fediy and his wife; Theodore Fesenko; Constantine Fesenko; Melania Fediy; Lawrenty Fediy; Peter Fediy; Eulysis Fediy and his brother Fred; Isidore Fediy, his wife and two children; Ivan Hontowy, his wife and two children; Vasyl Perch, his wife and child; Makar Fediy; Prokip Fesenko: Abraham Fediy; Ivan Skaska, his wife and eight children.Some of these people were buried in a cemetery plot; others were left lying wherever they died. For instance, Elizabeth Lukashenko died on the meadow; her remains were eaten by ravens. Others were simply dumped into any handy excavation. The remains of Lawrenty Fediy lay on the hearth of his dwelling until devoured by rats.*

And that's just one village — Fediivka, in the Poltava Province.

We will never know whether Walter Duranty, the principal New York Times correspondent in the U.S.S.R., ever visited Fediivka. Almost certainly not. What we do know is that, in March 1933, while telling his readers that there had indeed been "serious food shortages" in the Ukraine, he was quick to reassure them that "there [was] no actual starvation." There had been no "deaths from starvation," he soothed, merely "widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." So that was all right then.

But, unlike Khrushchev, Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less, was keeping count — in the autumn of 1933 he is recorded as having told the British Embassy that ten million had died. ** "The Ukraine," he said, "had been bled white," remarkable words from the journalist who had, only days earlier, described talk of a famine as "a sheer absurdity," remarkable words from the journalist who, in a 1935 memoir had dismayingly little to say about one of history's greatest crimes. Writing about his two visits to the Ukraine in 1933, Duranty was content to describe how "the people looked healthier and more cheerful than [he] had expected, although they told grim tales of their sufferings in the past two years." As Duranty had explained (writing about his trip to the Ukraine in April that year), he "had no doubt that the solution to the agrarian problem had been found".

Well, at least he didn't refer to it as a "final" solution.

As the years passed, and the extent of the famine and the other, innumerable, brutalities of Stalin's long tyranny became increasingly difficult to deny, Duranty's reputation collapsed (I wrote about this on NRO a couple of years ago), but his Pulitzer Prize has endured.

Ah, that Pulitzer Prize. In his will old Joseph Pulitzer described what the prize was designed to achieve: " The encouragement of public service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education."

In 1932 the Pulitzer Board awarded Walter Duranty its prize. It's an achievement that the New York Times still celebrates. The gray lady is pleased to publish its storied Pulitzer roster in a full-page advertisement each year, and, clearly, it finds the name of Duranty as one that is still fit to print. His name is near the top of the list, an accident of chronology, but there it is, Duranty, Times man, denier of the Ukrainian genocide — proudly paraded for all to see. Interestingly, the list of prizewinners posted on the New York Times Company's website is more forthcoming: Against Duranty's name, it is noted that "other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage."

Understandably enough, Duranty's Pulitzer is an insult that has lost none of its power to appall. In a new initiative, Ukrainian groups have launched a fresh campaign designed to persuade the Pulitzer Prize Board to revoke the award to Duranty. The Pulitzer's nabobs do not appear to be impressed. A message dated April 29, 2003 from the board's administrator to one of the organizers of the Ukrainian campaign includes the following words:

The current Board is aware that complaints about the Duranty award have surfaced again. [The campaign's] submission…will be placed on file with others we have received. However, to date, the Board has not seen fit to reverse a previous Board's decision, made seventy years ago in a different era and under different circumstances.

A "different era," "different circumstances" — would that have been said, I wonder, about someone who had covered up Nazi savagery? But then, more relevantly, the Pulitzer's representative notes that Duranty's prize was awarded "for a specific set of stories in 1931," in other words, before the famine struck with its full, horrific, force. And there he has a point. The prize is designed to reward a specific piece of journalism — not a body of work. To strip Duranty of the prize on the grounds of his subsequent conduct, however disgusting it may have been, would be a retrospective change of the rules, behavior more typical of the old U.S.S.R. than today's U.S.A.

But what was that "specific set of stories?" Duranty won his prize "for [his] dispatches on Russia especially the working out of the Five Year Plan." They were, said the Pulitzer Board "marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity…."

Really? As summarized by S. J. Taylor in her excellent — and appropriately titled — biography of Duranty, Stalin's Apologist, the statement with which Duranty accepted his prize gives some hint of the "sound judgment" contained in his dispatches.

"Despite present imperfections," he explained, he had come to realize there was something very good about the Soviets' "planned system of economy." And there was something more: Duranty had learned, he said, "to respect the Soviet leaders, especially Stalin, who [had grown] into a really great statesman."

In truth, of course, this was simply nonsense, a distortion that, in some ways bore even less resemblance to reality than "Jimmy's World," the tale of an eight-year-old junkie that, briefly, won a Pulitzer for Janet Cooke of the Washington Post. Tragic "Jimmy" turned out not to exist. He was a concoction, a fiction, nothing more. The Post did he right thing — Cooke's prize was rapidly returned.

After 70 years the New York Times has yet to do the right thing. There is, naturally, always room for disagreement over how events are interpreted, particularly in an era of revolutionary change, but Duranty's writings clearly tipped over into propaganda, and, often, outright deception, a cynical sugarcoating of the squalor of a system in which he almost certainly didn't believe. His motivation seems to have been purely opportunistic, access to the Moscow "story" for the Times and the well-paid lifestyle and the fame ("the Great Duranty" was, some said, the best-known journalist in the world) that this brought. Too much criticism of Stalin's rule and this privileged existence would end. Duranty's "Stalin" was a lie, not much more genuine than Janet Cooke's "Jimmy" and, as he well knew at the time, so too were the descriptions of the Soviet experiment that brought him that Pulitzer.

And if that is not enough to make the Pulitzer Board to reconsider withdrawing an award that disgraces both the name of Joseph Pulitzer and his prize, it is up to the New York Times to insist that it does so.

*From an account quoted in Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow. ** On another occasion (a dinner party, ironically) that autumn Duranty talked about seven million deaths.