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COMMENTARY by Ian Hunter
The Ukrainian Weekly, Ukrainian National Association (UNA)
Parsippany, New Jersey, May 4, 2003, No. 18, Vol. LXXI
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The 1932 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism was awarded to The New York Times
Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, whom Malcolm Muggeridge called
"the greatest liar I ever knew." Likewise, correspondent Joseph Alsop said:
"Lying was Duranty's stock in trade."
Yet for two decades Duranty was the most influential foreign correspondent
in Russia. His dispatches were regarded as authoritative; indeed Duranty
helped to shape U.S. foreign policy. His biographer, Susan Taylor ("Stalin's
Apologist," Oxford University Press, 1990) has demonstrated that Duranty's
reporting was a critical factor in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1933
decision to grant official recognition to the Soviet Union.
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Malcolm Muggeridge
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Duranty, an unattractive, oversexed little man, with a wooden leg, falsified
facts, spread lies and half truths, invented occurrences that never
happened, and turned a blind eye to the man-made famine that starved to
death more than 14 million people (according to the International Commission
of Jurists that examined this tragedy in 1988-1990).
When snippets of the truth began to leak out, Duranty coined the phrase:
"You can't make am omelet without breaking eggs." This phrase, or a variant
thereof, has since proved useful to a rich variety of ideologues who contend
that a worthy end justifies base means. Yet, when the Pulitzer committee
conferred its prize on Duranty, they cited his "scholarship, profundity,
impartiality, sound judgment, and exceptional clarity."
In the spring of 1933 Malcolm Muggeridge, newly arrived in Moscow as
correspondent for The Manchester Guardian, did an audacious thing; without
permission he set off on a train journey through what had formerly been the
breadbasket of the Soviet Union, Ukraine and North Caucasus. What
Muggeridge witnessed, he never forgot.
In a series of articles smuggled out in diplomatic pouch, he described a
man-made famine that had become a holocaust: peasants, millions of them,
dying like famished cattle, sometimes within sight of full granaries,
guarded by the army and police. "At a railway station early one morning, I
saw a line of people with their hands tied behind them, being herded into
cattle trucks at gunpoint - all so silent and mysterious and horrible in the
half light, like some macabre ballet."
At a German cooperative farm, an oasis of prosperity in the collectivized
wilderness, he saw peasants kneeling down in the snow, begging for a crust
of bread. In his diary, Muggeridge wrote: "Whatever else I may do or think
in the future, I must never pretend that I haven't seen this. Ideas will
come and go; but this is more than an idea. It is peasants kneeling down in
the snow and asking for bread. Something that I have seen and understood."
But few believed him. His dispatches were cut. Muggeridge was forced to
leave Russia. He was sacked, then vilified, slandered and abused, not least
in the pages of The Manchester Guardian, whose sympathy to what was called
"the great Soviet experiment" was de rigeur. Duranty's voice led the chorus
of denunciation and denial, although privately Duranty told a British
Foreign Office acquaintance that at least 10 million people had been starved
to death - adding, characteristically, "but they're only Russians."
If vindication was a long time coming, it cannot have been sweeter than when
Duranty's biographer, Susan Taylor, wrote in 1990: "But for Muggeridge's
eyewitness accounts of the famine in the spring of 1933 and his stubborn
chronicle of the event, the effects of the crime upon those who suffered
might well have remained as hidden from scrutiny as its perpetrators
intended. Little thanks he has received for it over the years, although
there is a growing number who realize what a singular act of honesty and
courage his reportage constituted."
Alas, when these words came to be written, Muggeridge had died. Still, they
are worth remembering.
Ian Hunter, professor emeritus at the Faculty of Law at the University of
Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, was Malcolm Muggeridge's
first biographer.
The Ukrainian Weekly, Ukrainian National Association, Roma Hadzewycz,
Editor-in-chief; Parsippany, NJ; May 4, 2003, No. 18, Vol. LXXI
http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/2003/180315.shtml
The Ukrainian Weekly Archive: www.ukrweekly.com
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