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Walter Duranty
Born: 25 May 1884 in Liverpool, England. Died: 3 October 1957 in Orlando, Florida.
Walter Duranty was a Liverpool-born Anglo-American journalist who served as 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 had 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."
Early life and career: Duranty was born in a middle-class Merseyside family to Emmeline (née Hutchins) and William Steel Duranty. His grandparents had moved to Birkenhead on the Wirral from the West Indies in 1842 and established a successful merchant business in which his father worked. He studied at Harrow, one of Britain's most prestigious public schools, but a sudden collapse in the family business led to a transfer to Bedford College. Nevertheless, he gained a scholarship to study at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a first-class degree.
After completing his education, Duranty moved to Paris, where he met Aleister Crowley and participated in magic rituals with him. Duranty became involved in a relationship with Crowley's mistress, Jane Chéron, and eventually married her. They appear in Crowley's Moonchild. Chéron is "zizi" and Duranty is "her English journalist." In Magick Without Tears, Crowley terms Duranty "my old friend" and quotes from Duranty's book I Write as I Please. He helped Crowley compose "The Holy Hymns to the Great Gods of Heaven."
During the Great War, Duranty worked as a reporter for The New York Times. A story Duranty filed about the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 gained him wider notice as a journalist. He moved to Riga, Latvia, to cover events in the newly independent Baltic states.
Career in Moscow: Duranty moved to the Soviet Union in 1921. On holiday in France in 1924, his left leg was injured in a train wreck. After an operation, the surgeon discovered gangrene and the leg was amputated. Once he had recovered, Duranty returned to the Soviet Union.
During the New Economic Policy, which implemented a mixed economy, Duranty's articles failed to draw widespread attention. After the advent of the first five-year plan (1928–1933), which aimed to transform Soviet industry and agriculture, however, he was granted an exclusive interview with Joseph Stalin that greatly enhanced his reputation as a journalist. Duranty remained in Moscow for twelve years.
After settling in the United States in 1934, Duranty was placed on retainer with The New York Times, the terms of which required him to spend several months a year in Moscow. In this capacity, he reported on the show trials of Stalin's political opponents in 1936–1938.
Views on the Soviet Union: In the 1931 series of reports for which he received the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence, Duranty argued that the Russian people were "Asiatic" in thought, valuing communal effort and requiring autocratic government. He claimed that they viewed individuality and private enterprise as alien concepts that led to social disruption and were just as unacceptable to them just as tyranny and Communism were unacceptable to the Western world.
Failed attempts since the time of Peter the Great to apply Western ideals in Russia were a form of European colonialism, he wrote, that had been finally swept away by the 1917 Revolution. Vladimir Lenin and his New Economic Policy were both failures tainted by Western thought. Duranty believed that Stalin scrapped the New Economic Policy because he had no political competition. The famine in Ukraine demonstrated the lack of organized opposition to Stalin, because his position was never truly threatened by the catastrophe. Stalin succeeded where Lenin had failed: he "re-established a dictator of the imperial idea and put himself in charge" by means of intimidation. "Stalin didn't look upon himself as a dictator, but as a 'guardian of a sacred flame' that he called Stalinism for lack of a better name." Stalin's five-year plan was an attempt to effect a new way of life for the Russian people.
Duranty argued that the Soviet Union's mentality in 1931 greatly differed from the perception created by the ideas of Karl Marx; he viewed Stalinism as an integration of Marxism with Leninism. In one of his articles submitted for the Pulitzer Prize, Duranty opines on the Soviet actions that led to the famine.
Duranty sometimes claimed that individuals being sent to the labor camps in the Russian North, Siberia, or Kazakhstan were given a choice between rejoining Soviet society or becoming underprivileged outsiders. However, he admitted that for those who could not accept the system, "the final fate of such enemies is death". Though describing the system as cruel, he stated that he had "no brief for or against it, nor any purpose save to try to tell the truth". He argued that the brutal collectivization campaign was motivated by the "hope or promise of a subsequent raising up" of Asian-minded masses in the Soviet Union that only history would be able to judge.
Duranty both admitted the brutality of the Stalinist system and defended the necessity of it. He repeated Soviet views as his own opinion, as if his 'observations' from Moscow had given him deeper insights into the country as a whole.
Duranty's motivations have been hotly debated and his reporting is faulted for being too uncritical of the USSR, presenting Soviet propaganda as legitimate reporting.
In his praise of Joseph Stalin as an imperial, national, "authentically Russian" dictator to be compared to Ivan the Terrible, Duranty was expressing views similar to those of some White (Russian) émigrés during the same period, namely the Smenovekhovtsy movement, echoing still earlier hopes by the Eurasianism movement and the Mladorossi group currents in the 1920s. (Of course, Stalin was not Russian, but Georgian, with distant Ossetian ancestry—his paternal great-grandfather was an Ossetian—a fact that he himself downplayed during his lifetime.)
In 1933, Stalin rewarded this praise and appreciation by saying that Duranty tried "to tell the truth about our country".
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:
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.
Later career: In 1934, Duranty left Moscow and visited the White House in the company of Soviet officials, including Litvinov. He continued as a Special Correspondent for The New York Times until 1940.
He wrote several books on the Soviet Union after 1940. His name was on a list maintained by writer George Orwell of those Orwell considered to be unsuitable as possible writers for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department owing to the possibility of them being too sympathetic to communism or possibly paid communist agents.
Death: Duranty died in Orlando, Florida in 1957 and is interred at Greenwood Cemetery. |
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