Walter durante biography

Walter Duranty was a New York Times reporter whom his greatest critics claim covered up Stalin’s crimes.

Walter duranty biography For instance, after the death of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, he filed a gripping account of Lenin's funeral procession. This early success of Stalin's Five Year Plan stood in contrast to the economic crisis of the capitalist world. 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 State Prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky, an architect of Stalin's Great Purges. Herman Bernstein.

He was part of an intellectual class spellbound by Soviet economic policy. Editor Oswald Garrison Villard, in a article called “Russia from a Car Window,” could hardly contain himself in his endorsement, despite speaking no Russian and never having met a Russian peasant: “This, I repeat, is the most stupendous governmental feat ever undertaken—the social, moral, political, industrial, economic emancipation of a people and its reorganization upon the basis of service to the society and to the nation, with the profit-making motive suddenly removed from the individual.” He was sure that “the minority which controls the destiny of Russia is on its way with extraordinary and completely unselfish devotion, with the fiercest determination to succeed at any cost.” To the charge that the Russian communists were fanatics he shot back: “Who else but fanatics would have the course for the task or could be relied upon to drive through to the end without essential compromise?” Such a task required something more than “timid or half-way reformers.” The Soviet dictatorship wasn’t really so bad, since the ruling party was “working for the good of the masses of the working people.”

Perhaps the most notorious figure in this context is New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who covered up one of the greatest atrocities of the twentieth century.

Walter Duranty New York Times

Walter Duranty, desperate to maintain his access to Stalin, could consistently be counted on to portray the regime sympathetically.

In November , he claimed that “there is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be.” In June , with death everywhere in Ukraine, Duranty reported: “The ‘famine’ is mostly bunk.” In August he wrote that “any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”

Malcolm Muggeridge, a British journalist who attempted to report the truth about the grisly events unfolding in Ukraine, later described Duranty as “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism.” Muggeridge chose his words carefully.

Duranty was no ignoramus. He knew full well the terrifying nature and scope of what was occurring, as we know from his own private comments to others. In one letter he estimated the number of deaths at seven million; in another he guessed ten million.

The Nation magazine praised Duranty in the early s for composing “the most enlightening, dispassionate and readable dispatches from a great nation in the making which appeared in any newspaper in the world.” For The Nation, as for so many other American “progressives,” Stalin’s Russia was “a great nation in the making.” Duranty even won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Russia in

Some people did manage to get the word out about what was happening in Ukraine.

Walter durante biography While acknowledging that Duranty's work "falls short of today's standards of foreign reporting," the committee stated that there was "no clear and convincing evidence of willful deception. Roosevelt 's decision to grant official recognition to the Soviet Union. Duranty's stature grew when he correctly predicted that Josef Stalin would rise to power in the Soviet Union after Lenin's death. Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.

But when a paper with the prestige of the New York Times denied the existence of the famine, doubts remained. As Conquest explains, “This lobby of the blind and the blindfold could not actually prevent true accounts by those who were neither dupes nor liars from reaching the West. But they could, and did, succeed in giving the impression that there was at least a genuine doubt about what was happening.

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"Walter Duranty: The New York Times Reporter Who Failed To Report Soviet-Triggered Famines" History on the Net
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