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Jan. 26, 2005 If you go to "The Pulitzer Prizes" at www.pulitzer.org and click on 1932, you'll see, among others, the following entry: CORRESPONDENCE: Walter Duranty of New York Times. For his series of dispatches on Russia especially the working out of the Five Year Plan. For several years a number of Ukrainian-interest groups have been conducting a campaign to get the New York Times to repudiate the prize and/or the Pulitzer Prize Board to retract it, apparently unavailingly thus far. Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the NYT reasons that repudiating the prize would be like Stalin's technique of airbrushing fallen party leaders out of group photographs. It would set an undesirable precedent, he says. But comparing the New York Times and the Communist Party wouldn't, I suppose. What's this all about anyway? Duranty, born in 1884 in LIverpool, got a job with the NYT in 1913. A one-time fellow satanist of Aleister Crowley, Duranty covered WWI in France, the Versailles peace negotiations and, later, unrest in the Baltics. Originally he took an anti-Communist stance, which prevented his accreditation in the USSR, so doing an aboutface, he wrote some laudatory articles, and got in. From 1922 to 1934 he lived in Russia. By 1923, when Lenin, who had turned feeble-minded from atherosclerosis, was beginning to breathe frankincense, Duranty recognized Stalin as the rising star in the Soviet Union. He was privileged with two private interviews with Stalin in the early 30's. He accompanied Maxim Litvinov, Stalin's commissar of foreign affairs, to Washington in 1933, meeting privately with Roosevelt, and paving the way for American diplomatic recognition of the USSR. This was at the height of the holodomor, or starvation, in Ukraine. This was a deliberate and willful genocide of 7 to 10 million Ukrainians. The original idea as propounded by Lenin in the early 20's was that peasant-owned agricultural lands would be collectivized, with the peasants assuming the role of state employees. Grain and other farm produce would be requisitioned by the state, as state property, and food would be dispensed according to need. But Lenin was in no position to guarantee that such a plan would work, especially in view of widespread famine and chaos arisen as a consequence of WWI and the Communist Revolution. Peasants, deforced of their lands amd robbed of their produce, did not receive the promised food. Lenin had instituted a program of rackulachovanie--eliminating prosperous peasants--a sort of euphemism for killing dissidents. "Are we afraid to hang 100 of these sh@theads?," he asked. Some people pretend that if Lenin hadn't died prematurely, Communism would have worked, but his attitude was just as venomous and vicious as Stalin's. Peasants, landless and hungry, revolted again and again, and under Stalin, repressions grew even faster, ending in the holodomor. Duranty knew all about the holodomor but chose to look the other way, playing it down, by blaming it on epidemics or by accusing Ukrainian peasants of the kind of laziness Stalin was justified in punishing. He had a tacit understanding with Stalin, "I'll make you look good in the US, and you let me stay in the USSR with my mistress, Katya, my big paycheck from the NYT and my world- reputation as a star reporter." In other words, he whitewashed the murder of millions. It's not as if perhaps he wasn't aware of the magnitude of the genocide taking place. In private conversations, he revealed that he knew exactly what was going on. He was collaborating with Stalin. Malcolm Muggeridge, a Guardian correspondent who visited the Ukraine during the holodomor, reported the dreadful situation, which cost him his job, so great apparently was Duranty's influence in the press. Duranty called Gareth Jones, a man who traveled through Ukraine at the same time, a 'liar' for simply reporting the truth. Nowadays, the NYT, while acknowledging that Duranty's articles were in error, has a number of rationalizations for their non-repudiation of his Pulitzer Prize. Sulzberger, who never missed a meal in his life, calls it a 'complex and sensitive' issue, and 'regrets' the 'lapses' in Duranty's reportage, extending his 'sympathy' to those who suffered in the holodomor. Why doesn't he just junk the prize? Is it because as, a Jewish entertainer for a Jewish audience, he sees Ukrainians as anti-Semites and fears reader backlash? ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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