Hunger For Truth

Ray Gamache: Gareth Jones - Eyewitness to the Holodomor

The Weekly Standard, March 24, 2014

For decades, the notebooks of Gareth Jones (1905-35), a brilliant young Welshman murdered in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, were stashed away in his family’s house in South Wales, only to be retrieved by his niece, Siriol Colley, in the early 1990s. By that time, Jones, once a highly promising journalist and an aide to a rather better-known Welshman, David Lloyd George, had largely vanished from history.  But two books that appeared around then, Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow (1986) and Sally J. Taylor’s Stalin’s Apologist (1990), gave a hint of what was to come.

In the first, a groundbreaking account of the manufactured famine that devastated Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33, Conquest told how Jones had gotten off a Kharkov-bound train, tramped through the broken Ukrainian countryside, and, on his return to the West, sounded the alarm about what Ukrainians now call the Holodomor (literally, to “kill by hunger”). Conquest explained how Jones’s “honorable and honest reporting” was trashed not only by Soviet officialdom, but also by Western journalists in the Soviet capital, a squalid episode discussed in more depth in Stalin’s Apologist, a biography of Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent in Moscow.

Duranty, whose relationship with the Stalin regime fueled a very well-paid career, took the lead in discrediting Jones. Claims of famine were “exaggeration” or, worse, “malignant propaganda.” Jones hit back, but to little avail. With just two years of life remaining to him, the path for his descent into historical oblivion was set. As for those three, four, five, maybe more, million deaths—well, so far as the West was concerned, nothing on that scale had happened. Sure, something bad had taken place, but to borrow Duranty’s term, there’s no omelet without breaking eggs; that’s how it goes.

It says something about the extent to which the Ukrainian genocide had been erased from Western memory that when Colley went through her uncle’s notebooks—the scribbled source material for the best English-language eyewitness reports of the famine—what caught her eye most (admittedly it had long been the source of family speculation) were later sections relating to what would ultimately be his murder in Manchuria. That was the topic that became the subject of Colley’s first book, Gareth Jones—A Manchukuo Incident (2001), a privately published volume in which only a page or two was reserved for Ukraine.

Times change. The reappearance of Gareth Jones was accelerated by the determination of many Ukrainians—free at last from imposed Soviet silence—to understand their own history. The investigation of a family tragedy broadened into an effort, helped by supportive members of the Ukrainian diaspora, to rediscover a journalist whose long-forgotten writing could be used to shape this newly independent nation’s sense of self and, more specifically, to help pull it away from Russia’s grip. It is no coincidence that Gareth Jones was posthumously awarded Ukraine’s Order of Merit at a time when Viktor Yushchenko, the most pro-Western of Ukraine’s presidents up until now, was in charge. 

By then, Siriol Colley had written More Than a Grain of Truth (2005), a biography (again self-published) of her uncle, offering a fuller portrait of a man who was a blend of Zelig—on a plane with Adolf Hitler, at San Simeon with William Randolph Hearst, you name it—and Cassandra, warning of nightmares to come. Meanwhile, a website (Garethjones.org) developed by Colley’s son Nigel had evolved into an invaluable online resource for anyone wanting to know more. Interest in Jones has continued to grow. A steady flow of stories in the British press, a documentary for the BBC, an exhibition at his old Cambridge college, and much else besides, were evidence that Jones was re-entering history beyond the frontiers of Ukraine—history that (as related in the West) finally had room for the Holodomor. This shift boosted interest in Jones, but was also, in a virtuous circle, partly the product of the rediscovery of his account of that hidden genocide, an account written in accessible English rather than a Slavic tongue.

But the reemergence of Jones does not diminish the darkness that accompanied his original eclipse, a darkness that runs through Gareth Jones: Eyewitness to the Holodomor. Ray Gamache’s work does not pretend to be a comprehensive biographical study, although it features enough helpful detail to act as a reasonable introduction to Jones’s extraordinary life. And it handily knocks down a few myths along the way. To name but two, the notion of a plot by the Moscow correspondents (such as it was) should not be overstated. And Jones did not sneak onto that train to Kharkov (his journey had official approval); it was where he got off—in the middle of nowhere, into the middle of hell—that was unauthorized.

That said, this fine book’s central focus is something more specific, a perceptive, methodical, and diligently forensic examination of the articles that Gareth Jones wrote about the Soviet Union, the circumstances in which they were written, the message they were designed to deliver, and, critically, their overall reliability. The reader is left in no doubt that this courageous, intensely moral man, an exemplar of the Welsh Nonconformist conscience at its best, saw the horrors he so meticulously chronicled in his notebooks and to which he then bore witness in his journalism: “This ruin I saw in its grim reality. .  .  . I saw children with swollen bellies.”

This is an academic book and thus not entirely free of jargon (“journalism texts are linguistic representations of reality”) or the contemplation of topics, such as the journalistic ethics of Jones’s giving food to the starving, likely to be of scant interest off-campus. That said, Gamache’s shrewd, careful work gives an excellent sense of Jones’s powerful analytical skills and the layers of meaning contained in his plain, unvarnished prose.

Above all, this book forcefully conveys Jones’s foreboding that something wicked was headed towards the peasantry. A leftish liberal in that early-20th-century way, he had had a degree of sympathy with the professed ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution; but then, as he wrote later, “I went to Russia.” And while he found things to admire in the Soviet Union, the underlying structure of its society appalled him. He saw a ruthless Communist party astride a hierarchy of which the peasantry—relics of the past who were of use, mainly, to feed the industrial proletariat—were at the bottom. With the dislocation, the fanaticism, and the failures of the first Five Year Plan becoming increasingly obvious, Jones knew who would pay the price. References to the danger of famine begin to surface in his reporting, and by October 1932, he was writing two pieces for Cardiff’s Western Mail under the headline “Will there be soup?” In March 1933, Jones returned to the Soviet Union to find out. The rest is history.

That it took so long to be recognized as such, however, was due to more than Soviet disinformation and Walter Duranty’s lies. For as dishonest and influential as that campaign by Duranty was, some of it, even on its face, did not ring quite true—not least the tortured circumlocutions with which he buttressed his denials of famine. Writing in theNew York Times, Duranty conceded that, yes, there had been an increase in the death rate, but “not so much from actual starvation as from manifold disease due to lowered resistance.”

Phraseology like that is only sufficient to fool those who wanted to be fooled, and there were plenty in the West ready to give the Soviet Union the benefit of the doubt. Many more simply did not care. The broad outline of what was happening, if not its details, was there for anyone prepared to look. To take just a few examples, there was the reporting of Jones and a handful of others (including Malcolm Muggeridge, whose role vis-à-vis Jones was, as Gamache reminds us, a complex one); there were the stories filtering out through the diaspora; there was the relief effort being attempted by Austria’s Cardinal Innitzer. But few took much interest. After all, said Duranty later, the dead were “only Russians,” a faraway, alien people who didn’t, apparently, count for a great deal.

And there was something else. Gamache records how the Foreign Office, which had access to good information of its own about the famine, deliberately kept quiet, worried about some British engineers then being held by the Soviets—by July 1933, all had been released—and, more broadly, about damaging Britain’s relations with the USSR, a concern sharpened, Gamache suggests (perhaps too charitably), by Hitler’s arrival in power earlier that year.

Looking across the Atlantic, Gamache notes, it has been argued that plans by the Roosevelt administration to extend diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union may well have led Washington to downplay the famine. In any event, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to establish formal diplomatic relations in November 1933, an event fêted with a lavish dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, where Walter Duranty was a guest of honor. In a nod to the cuisine of the Soviet homeland, borscht, a traditional Ukrainian dish as it happens, was on the menu. That evening, at least, there was soup.

A Hero of Our Time: Gareth Jones, 20th-century truth-teller.

National Review, September 17, 2004

The notebooks—worn, creased, and drab, but haunting nonetheless—lay carefully set out on a table in the lobby of a New York hotel. Their pages were filled with notes, comments, and calculations, jotted and scribbled in the cursive, spiky script once a hallmark of pre-war Britain's educated classes. Their author had, it seems, wandered through a dying village deep within Stalin's gargoyle empire. "Woman came out and started crying. 'They're killing us. In my village there used to be 300 cows and now we only have 30. The horses have died. How can I feed us all?'" It was the Ukraine, March 1933, a land in the throes of a man-made famine, the latest murderous chapter in Soviet social engineering. Five, six, seven million had died, maybe more. As Khrushchev later explained, "No one was counting."

But how had these notebooks found their way to a Hilton in Manhattan? Some years ago, in a town in Wales, an old, old lady, older than the century in which she lived, was burgled. As a result, she moved out of her home. When her niece, Siriol, came to clear up whatever was left, she found a brown leather suitcase monogrammed "G.V.R.J." and, lying under a thick layer of dust, a black tin box. Inside them were papers, letters, and, yes, those notebooks ("nothing had been thrown away"), the last records of Gareth Jones—"G.V.R.J."—Siriol's "jolly," brilliant Uncle Gareth, a polyglot traveler and journalist. In 1935 he had been killed by bandits in Manchuria, or so it was said. All that was left was grief, his writings, and the memory of a talented man cut down far, far too soon.

Seven decades later, as I sat talking to Siriol Colley in that midtown hotel, looking through Jones's papers, his press clippings, even his passport, it was not difficult to get a sense of the uncle she still mourned. Welsh to his core, he was typical of those clever, energetic Celts who did so well in the British Empire, restless (all those visa stamps, Warsaw, Berlin, Riga . . .), ambitious, and enterprising. Despite his youth, Jones seemed to get everywhere, Zelig with a typewriter. On New Year's Day 1935, for instance, he was in San Simeon, Kane's Xanadu itself, side by side with William Randolph Hearst. Earlier, we find him on a plane with Hitler ("looks like a middle-class grocer"), and, why, there he is, smiling on the White House lawn in April 1931, standing just behind a hopeless, hapless Herbert Hoover.

Above all, this man who reportedly charmed his captors in Manchuria by singing them hymns, was what the Welsh call “chapel”: pious, hardworking, teetotal, a little priggish, and armed with a sense of right and wrong so fierce that it gave him the strength to report the truth of what he saw, at the cost, if need be, of his career and, some would say, his life. Jones’s politics were typically chapel too, steeped as they were in the Liberal traditions of Welsh Nonconformism. Ornery, high-minded, pacifist, egalitarian, a touch goofy, a little bit utopian, Jones was just the sort of Westerner who might have been attracted to the Soviet experiment. And so he was—initially. In a 1933 article for the London Daily Express, Jones recalled how “the idealism of the Bolsheviks impressed me . . . the courage of the Bolsheviks impressed me . . . the internationalism of the Bolsheviks impressed me,” but “then,” he added, “I went to Russia.”

And there, for Jones, everything changed. His accounts of his visits to the USSR (the first was in 1930) are a chronicle of mounting disillusion. Reading them now, particularly the occasional attempts to highlight some Soviet achievement or other, it’s easy to see that this young Welsh liberal, this believer, wanted to trust in Moscow’s promise of a radiant future, but Communist reality—dismal, savage, and hopeless—kept intruding. Unlike many who came to inspect the people’s paradise, he reported on its dark side too. For Jones, there was no choice. It was the truth, you see.

By the autumn of 1932, Jones was sounding the alarm (“Will There Be Soup?” and “Russia Famished Under the Five-Year Plan”) about the catastrophe to come: “The food is not there.” Early the next year, he returned to Moscow to check the situation for himself, took a train to the Ukraine, and then walked out into the wrecked, desperate countryside. Once back in the West, he wasted no time, not even waiting to get back home before telling an American journalist in Berlin what he had seen: Millions were dying.

Soviet denials were to be expected. That they were supported by the New York Times was not. The newspaper’s Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, reassured his readers that Jones had been exaggerating. The Welshman was, he condescended, “a man of a keen and active mind . . . but [his] judgment was somewhat hasty . . . It appeared that he had made a forty-mile walk through villages in the neighborhood of Kharkhov and found conditions sad.” Sad—not much of an adjective, really, to describe genocide.

The Times’s man, who had won a Pulitzer the previous year for “the scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity” of his reporting from the Soviet Union, did not share Jones’s sense of “impending doom.” Yes, “to put it brutally,” omelettes could not be made without breaking eggs, but there had been “no actual starvation or deaths from starvation.” Duranty came, he claimed, to this conclusion only after “exhaustive enquiries about this alleged famine situation,” but other discussions probably influenced him more. The big story in Moscow in the spring of 1933—bigger by far than the death of a few million unfortunate peasants—was the pending show trial of six British engineers. Courtroom access and other cooperation from Soviet officialdom would be essential for any foreign journalist wanting to satisfy the news desk back home. That would come at a price. The price was Jones.

Eugene Lyons, another American journalist in Moscow at the time, later explained that “throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes—but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered . . . were snowed under by our denials.” According to Lyons (not always, admittedly, the most reliable of witnesses, but the essence of his tale rings true), a deal was struck at a meeting between members of the American press corps and Konstantin Umansky, the chief Soviet censor. “There was much bargaining in a spirit of gentlemanly give-and-take . . . before a formula of denial was worked out. We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in round-about phrases that damned Jones as a liar. The filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski.” Spinning a famine was, apparently, thirsty work.

Undaunted by the attacks on his accuracy, Jones intensified his efforts. There were articles in the Daily Express, the Financial Times, the Western Mail, the London Evening Standard, the Berliner Tageblatt, as well as a lengthy letter to the Manchester Guardian in support of Malcolm Muggeridge, who had, like Jones, told the truth about the famine and, like Jones, been vilified in return (suggestions that there was starvation in the USSR were, said George Bernard Shaw, “offensive and ridiculous”). In a letter published by the New York Times in May 1933, Jones hit back at Walter Duranty. The reports of widespread famine were, he wrote, based not only on what he had seen in the villages of the Ukraine, but also on extensive conversations with other eyewitnesses, diplomats, and journalists. After a few polite remarks about Duranty’s “kindness and helpfulness,” the tone turned contemptuous. Directly quoting from Duranty’s own dispatches, Jones charged that censorship had turned some journalists into “masters of euphemism and understatement . . . [They] give ‘famine’ the polite name of ‘food shortage’ and ‘starving to death’ is softened down to read as ‘widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.’. . . Mr. Duranty says that I saw in the villages no dead human beings nor animals. That is true, but one does not need a particularly nimble brain to grasp that even in the Russian famine districts the dead are buried . . . [T]he dead animals are devoured.”

Moscow responded by barring Jones from the USSR. He was cut off for good from the site of the story he had made his own. Duranty received a rather different reward. Some months later he accompanied the Soviet foreign minister on a trip to America, a journey that was to culminate in FDR’s decision to extend diplomatic recognition to the Communist regime, a decision that was fêted, fêted in that famine year, with a celebration dinner at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel, at which Duranty was honored with cheers and a standing ovation. On Christmas Day 1933 came the greatest prize of all—an interview with Stalin himself. Well, of course. It was a reward for work well done. Duranty had, said the dictator, “done a good job in . . . reporting the USSR.”

But history had not yet finished with Gareth Jones. The young Welshman possessed, explained David Lloyd George, the former prime minister for whom Jones had, some years before, worked as an aide, “a passion for finding out what was happening in foreign lands wherever there was trouble, and in pursuit of his investigations he shrank from no risk.” So, it’s no surprise to find him in Japan in early 1935, interviewing, questioning, snooping, and perhaps attracting the sort of attention that could turn out to be fatal. By July that year he was heading through the increasing chaos of northern China toward Japanese- controlled Manchuria (Manchukuo). On July 26, Jones updated the narrative he was writing for the last time. He was, he wrote, “witnessing the changeover of a big district from China to Manchukuo. There are barbed-wire entanglements just outside the hotel. There are two roads . . . [O]ver one 200 Japanese lorries have traveled; the other is infested by bad bandits.” Two days later, the bandits struck. Jones was kidnapped. He was murdered two weeks later. It was the eve of his 30th birthday.

We will probably never know who was ultimately responsible for Jones’s death. There had been a ransom demand, and so, perhaps, this was just a kidnapping that went horribly wrong. There are, however, other possibilities. The Japanese would certainly not have welcomed a Westerner watching the takeover of yet another Chinese province, and there is some evidence that the kidnappers were under their control. It’s also intriguing to discover that one of Jones’s contacts in those final days was linked to a company now known to have been a front for the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. To Lloyd George, only one thing was clear: “Gareth Jones knew too much.”

And if he knew too much, the rest of the world understood too little. For decades, like the dead whose story he told, this lost witness to a genocide seemed doomed to be forgotten, a family tragedy, a footnote, but now that’s changing. Jones is at last returning to view, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the indefatigable Siriol Colley, the author of a book about her uncle—and a second is on the way. (Colley’s son Nigel has also set up a website: www.colley.co.uk/garethjones/index.html.)

One thing, however, has not changed. On December 4 last year, not long after the Pulitzer committee decided that Duranty should retain his prize, Colley wrote to the New York Times asking whether the paper could at least issue a public apology for the way in which its Moscow correspondent had smeared Jones. She’s still waiting.

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.

The Paper of Record

National Review Online, May 14 2001 

Imagine, if you can, Berlin in November 1938, the grim capital of a savage ideology heading deeper into horror and cruelty. The New York Times correspondent has just emerged from an interview with the Fuhrer. It is an exclusive. His editor will be pleased. On the way home the Times man passes a looted synagogue, and the broken bodies of those who were worshiping there. Elsewhere, homes and businesses are being ransacked, and their occupants are under attack. Other victims are rounded up and dragged to the concentration camps from which far too few will ever emerge. Filing a report that night, the journalist prefers not to dwell on such distasteful events. Instead he contents himself with a comment that stories of a Kristallnacht pogrom had been exaggerated. Yes, there had been some scattered excesses, but they had been the work of a few hotheads, nothing more. Delighted by the coverage, the Nazi hierarchy gives the correspondent privileged access. He becomes the doyen of the Third Reich's foreign press corps, the essential contact for every new visitor to Berlin. In the ultimate accolade the journalist wins a Pulitzer Prize for the "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity" of his reporting from Germany.

In the years that follow, of course, it becomes impossible to deny the reality of Hitler's charnel-house state. The reporter is revealed for what he really was, evil's enabler, a greedy, venal man, whose soothing words had done much to calm the fears of an outside world that might otherwise have tried to step in to stop the slaughter. Amazingly, however, more than 60 years later his Pulitzer still stands, and with it, his distinguished place in the history of the New York Times. Last month, the newspaper, as it does once every year, proudly published the honor roll of its Pulitzer-winning writers. It is not difficult to find the name of the dictator's apologist. It is right up there near the top, fitting company, in the view of the New York Times for the other journalists on the list: Walter Duranty is still, it is clear, a man with whom the Grey Lady is in love.

It is a remarkable, and disgusting, story. Sadly, it is also true, with only one qualification. The journalist, Walter Duranty, was a propagandist for Stalin not Hitler, the evil that he was to witness took place in the Soviet Union, not Nazi Germany.

For well over a decade, Duranty's influential reports from Moscow described a Soviet Union run by a tough, but dedicated, elite, who could, he conceded, be cruel, but only in the cause of improving the lives of the people. As the Times man liked to say, "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

To Duranty, Stalin ("the greatest living statesman") represented progress and the chance of a better future for the once benighted masses. In one typical passage he gushed that, "Stalin and his associates have carried with them the strongest and most intelligent elements of the Russian people, and have created a national unity and enthusiasm which the Tsarist Empire never knew. They have learnt by their own errors and pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, and the nation has followed them." It was, he wrote, "a heroic chapter in the life of humanity."

That this "heroic chapter" was to prove fatal for large numbers of that same humanity did not seem to trouble Duranty too much. "I'm a reporter," he explained, "not a humanitarian." In fact, he was neither, something that can be seen most clearly from his treatment of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3. This man-made famine, a deliberate attempt to break the Ukrainian peasantry, is one of history's most terrible episodes (In his Harvest of Sorrow Robert Conquest estimates the death toll in the Ukraine and neighboring regions at seven million). Walter Duranty of the New York Times, however, did what he could to cover it up.

It was behavior that puts the Pulitzer winner in the same moral category as the present day's Holocaust deniers, if not somewhere worse. Today's revisionists, I suppose, can at least claim the excuse that they were not there. By contrast, Duranty was right on the spot, in Moscow and briefly, even, in the killing fields of the Ukraine itself. He knew. Privately, he told British diplomats that as many as ten million people might have died, "The Ukraine," he admitted, "had been bled white."

Publicly, however, his story was very different. He claimed that tales of a famine were "bunk," "exaggeration," or "malignant propaganda." There was "no actual starvation." As other accounts of the tragedy filtered out, Duranty was forced to backpedal a little: his reports still avoided references to famine, but he conceded that the annual death rate in the affected areas might have trebled from its normal level of around one million to a total of three million. These unfortunates had perished not so much from "actual starvation as from manifold disease." It is an absurd distinction, as grotesque as any made by those revisionists who argue that many of the deaths in the Nazi camps were the product of typhus. Typically, such people will then sidestep the issue as to why it was that those victims were in the camps in the first place. Duranty took a similar approach. The increase in the death rate by two million was presented to his readers as an almost passive tense disaster: it just happened, nobody was really responsible.

In reality, of course, the famine was, as Duranty well understood, the organized product of a murderous regime. Had he told the truth, he could have saved lives. When today's revisionists deny the Shoah, their lies, thankfully, have little or no impact. They are simply irrelevant. Duranty's distortions, by contrast, helped mute international criticism of Stalin's lethal project at a crucial time, criticism that might, perhaps, have made the killing machine at least pause. Instead, the "Great Duranty" kept quiet, pocketed his Pulitzer, and crossed the Atlantic the following year in the company of the Soviet foreign minister, who was on his way to Washington to sign off on U.S. diplomatic recognition of the Stalinist state. Within four years an emboldened Stalin had launched the Great Terror.

As I said, it is a disgusting story, but not a new one. Back in 1974, Joe Alsop used his final syndicated column to attack Duranty's pro-Soviet stance, and Robert Conquest covered the same ground in rather more detail a few years later. 1990 saw renewed focus on this subject with the publication of Stalin's Apologist, S. J. Taylor's invaluable biography of Duranty. The New York Times responded with a favorable review of Ms. Taylor's book and an editorial comment that Walter Duranty had produced "some of the worst reporting to appear in [the] newspaper," citing, in particular his "lapse" in covering the Ukrainian famine.

That, at least, was a start, but eleven years later Duranty's name still features in the paper's annual honor roll of Pulitzer winners (the only change has been that he is now described as having won the award for his "coverage of the news from Russia," previously he was lauded for his "dispassionate interpretive reporting" of the news from Russia). For a journal that prides itself on its sensitivity this is another remarkable "lapse," one made stranger still by the Times's understanding in other contexts that the symbols of the past can still hurt. Its attacks on, say, the continued display of the Confederate flag might have more moral force if the paper could bring itself to stop its own annual celebration of an employee who was, in effect, a propagandist for genocide.

Nobody should ask the Times to rewrite history (that's something best left to Stalinists), but a Pulitzer Prize has, in the past, been withdrawn. It is a precedent that the paper should urge be followed in the case of Duranty, not for his opinions (loathsome though they may have been) but for the lies, evasions, and fabrications that characterized the reporting that won him his award. Beyond that, the paper should ask itself just what else it is going to do to make some amends to the memory of the millions of dead, victims whose murder was made just that little bit easier by the work of the man from the New York Times.

An apology might be a start.