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Article by Ian Hunter
Article Type: UCCLA Reprinted Article
Source: Report Magazine
Date: March 27, 2000
It is hard to credit that a decade has slipped away since the death of
Malcolm Muggeridge on November 14, 1990. The most compellingly
readable of journalists, hardly a day goes by that I do not recall one
of Muggeridge's insights or marvel afresh at his prophetic vision.
Muggeridge's journalistic integrity was shaped by one searing experience;
in 1932 he went to Moscow as correspondent for the Manchester
Guardian.
Joseph Stalin's twin manias - collectivization of agriculture and
dekulakization of peasants - were then at their bloodthirsty zenith, but few
Westerners could have guessed it from the sycophantic foreign reporting.
The Dean of the Moscow press corps was Walter Duranty of the New
York Times. Joseph Alsop would later say of him: "Lying was Duranty's
stock in trade."
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 Roosevelt's decision in 1933 to grant official recognition to the
Soviet Union.
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 an International Commission
of Jurists which examined this tragedy in 1988-90). When snippets of the
truth began to leak out, Duranty coined the phrase: "You can't make am
omelette 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 (in 1932, at
the height of the famine) they cited his "scholarship, profundity,
impartiality, sound judgment, and exceptional clarity."
One story that circulated among Moscow correspondents trying to explain
Duranty was that he was a necrophiliac; in exchange for favourable
reporting, the Soviet authorities may have allowed him unsupervised night
access to the city morgues. Whether true or not (and Duranty's biographer,
Susan Taylor, leaves this question open), certain it is that the regime had
some sort of hold on Duranty; they showered benefits on him, - a fancy
apartment, an automobile, and fresh caviar daily.
Enter Malcolm Muggeridge. In the spring of 1933 Muggeridge did an audacious
thing; without permission he set off on a train journey through what had
formerly been the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, the Ukraine and North
Caucusus. What Muggeridge witnessed, he never forgot.
In a series of articles smuggled out in the 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 into trucks at gunpoint - all so silent and mysterious and
horrible in the half light, like some macabre ballet."
At a German co-operative 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. He was sacked by the Guardian
and forced to leave Russia. Muggeridge was vilified, slandered and abused,
not least in the pages of the Manchester Guardian, where sympathy to what
was called "the great Soviet experiment" was de rigeur.
Walter Duranty's voice led the chorus of denunciation and denial, although
privately Duranty told a British foreign office acquaintance that at least
0 million people had been starved to death - adding, characteristically,
"but they're only Russians."
Beatrice Webb (Muggeridge's aunt by marriage) admitted that "In the Soviet
Union, people disappear," but she still denounced Muggeridge's famine
reports as "base lies". The Very Reverend Hewlett Johnson, Dean of
Canterbury, applauded Stalin's "steady purpose and kindly generousity."
George Bernard Shaw made a whirlwind tour and pronounced himself fully
satisfied that there was ample food for all in the worker's paradise.
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 honest and courage
his reportage constituted."
Alas, when these words came to be written, Muggeridge had died. Still,
they are worth remembering.
Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of
Western Ontario and was the first biographer of Malcolm Muggeridge.
http://www.uccla.ca/issues/genocide/i_gncd_032.html
Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association
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