Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow

by Sally J. Taylor

Short, unattractive, hobbling about Stalin's Moscow on a wooden leg, Walter Duranty was an unlikely candidate for the world's most famous foreign correspondent. Yet for almost twenty years his articles filled the front page of The New York Times with gripping coverage of the aftermath of the
Russian Revolution. A witty, engaging, impish character with a flamboyant life-style, he was a Pulitzer Prize winner, the individual most credited with helping to win U.S. recognition for the Soviet regime, and the reporter who had predicted the success of the Bolshevik state when all others
claimed it was doomed. But, as S.J. Taylor reveals in this provocative biography, Walter Duranty played a key role in perpetrating some of the greatest lies history has ever known.
Stalin's Apologist deftly unfolds the story of this accomplished but sordid and tragic life. Drawing on sources ranging from newspapers to private letters and journals to interviews with such figures as William Shirer and W. Averell Harriman, Taylor's vivid narrative unveils a figure driven
by ambition, whose early success reporting on Bolshevik Russia--he was foremost in predicting Stalin's rise to power--established his international reputation, fed his overconfident contempt for his colleagues, and indeed led him to identify with the Soviet dictator. Thus during the great Ukrainian
famine of the early 1930s, which Stalin engineered to crush millions of peasants who resisted his policies, Duranty dismissed other correspondents' reports of mass starvation and, though secretly aware of the full scale of the horror, effectively reinforced the official cover-up of one of history's
greatest man-made disasters. Later, he took the rigged show trials of Stalin's Great Purges at face value, blithely accepting the guilt of the victims. He believed himself the leading expert on the Soviet Union, and his faith in his own insight drew him into a downward spiral of distortions and
untruths, typified by his memorable excuse for Stalin's crimes, "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
Taylor brilliantly captures the full range of Duranty's astonishing life, from his participation in the Satanic orgies of Aleister ("the Beast") Crowley, to his dramatic front-line reporting during World War I, to his epic womanizing and heavy drug and alcohol abuse. It is the bitter, ironic
story of a man who had the rare opportunity to bring to light the suffering of the millions of Stalin's victims, but remained a prisoner of vanity, self-indulgence, and success.

Genres: History, Biography, Journalism, Politics, Nonfiction, American History, Russia

432 pages, Hardcover

First published March 29, 1990

About the author

Sally J Taylor has a PhD in Media Law and holds fellowships at both Illinois and the National Endowment of the Humanities in Washington DC. She has lived and worked in North London for 15 years and is the author of five books.

Reviews

[Patrick Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

2024-01-24 lightly edited for typos and clarity.
2020-09-01 Thinking about this a bit more, I need to mention the importance of government censors in Duranty's life & work. His first reporting job was as war correspondent in WWI. The book did a very good job of showing how insidious the allied censorship was during the war - how corrupting of the military, the reporters, and the populace, who were deprived of accurate information and opinions. But Duranty learned to thrive in that milieu - turning his character flaw of being increasingly good at lying, dissembling and working the corrupt system to his advantage.

Well, that experience and skill stood him in very good stead with the Soviet censors. He worked that system so well to his advantage that he earned himself a Pulitzer Prize and the acclaim of the world, for basically telling one huge lie - that Stalin's first 5 year plan was a brilliant idea and success. The world but most especially the Soviet Union's people paid a heavy price for believing that lie.

2020-08-31 Finished this yesterday. Very gripping. So many clues about Walter Duranty's sad life. I almost, almost felt sorry for him since the last third or so of the book just chronicled his last 25 years or so of decline into:
- bouts of alcoholism,
- foolish poverty (by spending too much and saving not at all,
- being a deadbeat to many creditors/friends,
- having almost no friends (partially due to the previous condition),
- never realizing/admitting his main professional fault(s),
- pleading for money and work, and thinking he was blacklisted, when he just would not realize that what he offered to write was not what people were willing to pay for.

Made totally clear to anyone who reads this book:
1. His disgust for capitalism and promotion of fantasy socialism vs. his love of the wealth and the freedom capitalism provided,
2. His knowing the lack of wealth under socialism and
3. His knowing of the massive snuffing out of liberties under Soviet Socialism.

His apologetics for Stalin, the USSR and socialist methods was incredibly counter-reality but he just could never admit it. He always highlighted the things that tried to make Stalin/USSR look good and almost never admitted their horror. And when people pointed that out, he lashed out in disgusting ad hominem and dissembling attacks.

His favorite phrase was "you can't make an omelet without cracking eggs" as his justification for the Holodomor (mass starvation of Ukrainians by Stalin), was so clever. But how many people understood/understand that he means humans should only be treated like eggs and have no more value than that to him? Let that thought sink in. Duranty's morality (which he abhorred admitting he had any!) meant that he/Stalin/whatever "great leader" he thought appropriate, should have the perfect right to kill/"crack" any human necessary, in order to create his idea of a great socialist society (omelet). Are you an egg? Do you like being "cracked" (killed), to create a "better" (in Duranty's view) society?

And people think Capitalism is immoral?

Read this book to see how the New York Times, the US's (and much of the whole world's) "top" literary, cultural, news and public affairs community adored him, got sucked in to his lies, equivocations and disgusting values. Note the huge number of elite figures in the world's intellectual circles who Duranty knew &/or influenced or were influenced by him - and sooo many of them were of the socialist persuasion, if not full red, then usually deep pink: Isadore Duncan, Alex Woollcott, Harpo Marx, Emma Goldman, Wm. Henry Chamberlain, Armand Hammer, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Sinclair Lewis, Wm. Shirer, John Wiley, John Gunther, Louis Fischer, etc. etc. And how this network of friends provided incredible connections for jobs, reviews/better sales of his work, tips, ego-stroking, etc. etc.

And despite Duranty knowing full well about the Holodomor, (millions of Ukrainians deliberately starved by Stalin's Soviet Socialist system) he never really recanted his despicable attacks on Gareth Jones who put forth the bravery and tenacity to report it.

2020-07-18 - started this a week or so ago right after seeing the great new movie "Mr. Jones" about Gareth Jones, the reporter who tried to expose the Holodomor - the famine caused by Stalin in Ukraine 1932-3, and went up against the Pulitzer prize winning icon, Walter Duranty in the process.

I'm on p. 116. so far.

The author goes into far more (some fairly trivial in my opinion) detail than I appreciate in many areas and too little in others. She does not appear to have a good understanding of economics, so can't see through some of Duranty's BS writing on that subject, (such as the subject for the Pulitzer win) so far anyway. But she is laying the groundwork for WHY Duranty seems to have acted the way he did in many strange/quirky respects, and that is valuable.
So far, this book is a very good complement to the movie on Gareth Jones ("Mr. Jones") - wow - what different values motivated each journalist!

[Michael Perkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a debacle. The NYT, which hates to admit it's ever wrong, should return Duranty's Pulitzer.

Malcolm Muggeridge, then the Manchester Guardian's Moscow correspondent, travelled secretly and at great risk to Ukraine. He was appalled at the scenes of mass starvation and heaps of dead bodies that he witnessed and described them in his reports. Because he covered it up, NYT correspondent Walter Duranty was 'the greatest liar of any journalist I have ever met," said Muggeridge.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/10970...

Loathsome...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...

Powerful recent film that exposes Duranty for the lying fraud he was, and Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist who exposed him. VERY TIMELY....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o7Vo...

[Michael Connolly · Rating 4 out of 5]

About the Author: Sally J. Taylor is an American writer living in London who has written several historical and biographical books on the British press.
Overview: Duranty believed that to be an objective reporter, he must not make moral judgements. But not only did Duranty fail to denounce Stalin’s crimes, he even helped cover them up. Duranty excused Stalin’s excesses by repeating the saying of the French Revolution figure Robespierre that you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his reporting from Moscow. Duranty was not a believer in Communist ideology, he was merely an amoral careerist.
Paris Before the Great War: While they were living in Paris before World War I and smoking opium, Walter Duranty and Aleister Crowley shared a lover named Jane Cheron. Duranty pestered Wythe Williams, the head of the Paris bureau of The New York Times, until Wythe gave him a job. During World War I, Duranty covered the Western Front for the New York Times.
The Baltics: After the end of World War I, the United States supported independence for the Baltic states, and sent Naval Commander John A. Gade to Estonia. The New York Times sent Duranty to Estonia to cover the Commander Gade. Walter Duranty interviewed a Russian sailor that the Bolsheviks had sent to Latvia with money and jewels to be given to American Communists. The resulting Red Courier story that Duranty wrote for the New York Times helped Duranty make a name for himself.
Content Analysis: In 1920 Charles Merz and Walter Lippman performed a content analysis of The New York Times coverage of the Soviet Union. They concluded that it was biased toward wishful thinking that the Bolsheviks would fall from power. The New York Times decided that they needed to have a reporter in Moscow.
The New York Times Man in Moscow: The American Relief Administration offered to help the Soviet Union with the 1921 famine in the Ukraine. But in order to receive famine relief, the United States demanded that the Bolsheviks allow Western reporters into Russia. The Bolsheviks did not want Walter Duranty, because his stories were generally anti-Bolshevik in tone. But when Duranty wrote a more neutral and objective report on Lenin’s New Economic Program, they relented. Duranty became The New York Time’s correspondent in Moscow. The Bolsheviks promised that they would not censor the stories the reporters sent back, except concerning military matters. But over the succeeding years, the Bolshevik censorship became tighter. Reporters risked losing their visas if they were too negative about the Soviet Union. Walter Duranty was the main reporter that the New York Times had in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. The NKVD provided Duranty with a comfortable apartment, an automobile, and a cook, named Katya, who became his mistress. Duranty hosted many parties in Moscow for his fellow expats and was known for being an amusing raconteur. Duranty rarely ventured out into the countryside, and so his reporting was based upon what he could obtain from sources in Moscow, most of which were the government itself.
Train Accident in France: November 1924 Duranty lost the bottom of his left leg at a train accident in France.
Duranty on Stalin
• Duranty was an early predictor that the successor to Lenin would be Stalin, because Stalin was better at political infighting.
• Duranty introduced the term Stalinism.
• Duranty interviewed Stalin for The New York Times, and a few weeks later he wrote a profile of Stalin for The New York Times Magazine.
Holodomor (1932-1933): There was a second famine in the Ukraine during 1932-1933. It was not the result of natural disaster, but of Stalin’s forced collectivization of the farms of the Ukraine. The Bolshevik agents stole the individually owned farm animals and possessions and put them under the regime’s lock and key. Many Ukrainian farmers slaughtered their farm animals, rather than surrender them to the Bolsheviks. The Red Army stole grain from the Ukrainian farmers and sold it abroad. Stalin also deported to Siberia millions of the more prosperous peasants, who were called kulaks. Kulak is the Russian word for fist, and it was applied, because many of them were money lenders. This genocide is now called the Holodomor. Great Britain continued to import Soviet grain during the Holodomor. In December 1932, the government introduced internal passports to prevent starving peasants from entering the cities. The U.S. State Department believed that reporting the famine would harm efforts to achieve diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union.
Duranty on the Holodomor
• Duranty supported the Soviet collectivization of agriculture.
• Duranty blamed the food shortage on the farmers who killed their farm animals rather than surrender them to the Bolsheviks
• Duranty promoted the Soviet view that the famine was the result of a conspiracy of wreckers obstructing collectivization.
• Duranty believed that in order to safeguard the Bolshevik revolution, it was more important to feed the factory workers than the peasants.
• Duranty repeatedly emphasized the distinction between people dying directly from malnutrition, and those dying from diseases that malnutrition made them vulnerable to, in order to minimize the number of people who could technically be said to died from starvation
• Duranty dismissed German reports of wide-scale famine.
• September 1933: Duranty went to the North Caucasus to report on famine. After returning, Duranty reported to the British Embassy in Moscow that millions were dying. Harrison Salisbury believed that when Duranty actually saw the extent of the famine with his own eyes, he was unwilling to admit that his previous assessment had been wrong.
• Years later, in retrospect, Duranty justified the transfers of grain from Ukraine to the Red Army in the Soviet Far East, because the Soviet Union was fighting the expansion of the Japanese empire.
Malcolm Muggeridge: Bolsheviks banned the foreign press from traveling to the famine areas. However, Malcolm Muggeridge managed to sneak into the Ukraine and find out what the Soviet government was hiding. His stories were smuggled out in diplomatic bags. Muggeridge published the truth in The Manchester Guardian in March 1933. The reward that Muggeridge received for his achievement was being black-listing by the British Left, mainly by Beatrice Webb.
Gareth Jones: The Moscow foreign press conspired to deny the reports of Welshman Gareth Jones that there was widespread famine in the Ukraine.
Old News: A few months later, when travel restrictions in the Soviet Union were lifted, the Ukrainian famine was old news, and received little attention by the press.
American Diplomatic Recognition of the Soviet Union: Walter Duranty favored the United States offering diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. In November 1933, Duranty accompanied Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov on his voyage across the Atlantic. Litvinov negotiated diplomatic ties with FDR. At the New York Waldorf-Astoria a dinner was held in honor of Litvinov. Duranty attended the dinner. When Duranty was introduced at the dinner, he was cheered by the crowd for facilitating the Soviet-American rapprochement.

[Bella · Rating 3 out of 5]

He came, he compared the working class to pigs, he left

[Flor De]

When you read this book, you understand why the New York Times is headed downhill. The premise at that time was that even if Duranty lied about Stalin's crimes, the famine in The Soviet Union and everything else, the proximity to the Dictator was more important to the NYT. That's exactly how they have covered Cuba and that is exactly why they have lost readers and credibility. It's a great book and gives great insight into those who preach journalist objectivity, demand it from others and don't practice it themselves. A must for students of journalism.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Walter Duranty is famous for his reporting on the USSR during Stalin’s murderous reign for which he won a Pulitzer. He is infamous for polishing Stalin’s image. Duranty also admired the Bolsheviks in general and was the source of the quote about breaking eggs to make omelets. Duranty led the charge against Gareth Jones’ accurate, first-hand reporting of the famine Jones witnessed in Ukraine.

The book is well researched with endnotes and a bibliography. Taylor rightly criticizes Duranty for not reporting the truth on the man-made famines and offering up a positive portrait of Stalin. She covers his lack of character, honesty and empathy. He was a useful idiot, but Taylor doesn’t think he was actively working with Stalin’s regime (although his Russian wife was). She paints him more as an gadfly opportunist. Stalin appreciated Duranty’s complimentary reporting and believed the reporter was instrumental in getting the Roosevelt Administration to recognize the Soviet Union. Stalin rewarded Duranty with exclusive, in-person interviews. Duranty also maintained a very nice lifestyle while he was in Moscow. Too nice for his salary at the NYT, tbh.

Although the show trials may have been brutal, Duranty posited that they allowed the USSR to go into a possible war (WWII) “devoid of saboteurs.”

“[Duranty] claimed that Russia had emerged from a semi-colonial state only because of the choice made by Stalin to industrialize rapidly. He re-emphasized the popularity of Stalin, looking at wide-spread benefits the Bolsheviks had brought to the common people in terms of education, medical care, and even holidays from work.” Walter Duranty cared little for common folks.

Duranty’s obituary in “Time” magazine, described him as, “the No. 1 Russian apologist in the West.”

[Danny Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amazing how a Pulitzer prize winning journalist watched while stalin starved millions and basically shrugged it off. And took lodging and favors from the soviet government and told socialists in America what they wanted to hear.

[Bill V · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very good read on an important figure who defended the evils of the Soviet Union. The writing is quite good but the narrative bogs down from time to time. It also occasionally became difficult to keep track of who was who in the narrative.

[Shirin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stalin apologists tend to fall into one of two camps: A) hardcore Stalinists who think he was a great humanist and the bestest communist ever and B) right-wing Russian nationalists. Duranty fits into neither of those camps, though much of his beliefs were far closer to the latter than the former. He in fact seems to have had no strongly held political beliefs, either left or right, and rather than wanting Western countries to embrace Soviet-style socialism as well instead seem to think it was only a good fit for Russians because they were a backwards and “Asiatic” people who were naturally inclined to despotism. (As an aside, I’m inclined to think, as Taylor does, that this persistent racism in Duranty’s thought probably owed a lot to having imbibed heaps of “White Man’s Burden” imperialism in British public school.)

A simple explanation would be that Duranty became a Stalin apologist out of pure opportunism, as James Alsop, Bill Stoneman, and Eugene Lyons suggested, and while that element was definitely present (certainly, printing what Stalin wanted to hear was a lot easier and more lucrative than risking getting deported for telling the ugly truth), there was more to it than that. There is an unmistakable undercurrent of both elitism and admiration for authoritarianism in Duranty’s writing. This goes a long way in explaining why he was so sympathetic to Stalin and so unsympathetic to the peasant victims of dekulakization: Taylor points out explicitly that Duranty in his writings often seemed to identify with Stalin as a sort of übermensch unrestrained by conventional morality, who was destined to rule over “lesser men”, and all his life desperately aspired to this kind of recognition.

I’m not inclined to agree with Taylor’s suggestion, however, that if Duranty had told the truth, then there would have been definite attempts to intervene to stop the famines in Ukraine or Kazakhstan. As a general rule of thumb, mass deaths of people within one’s borders most often invites apathy from the wider world. One might note that that was a similar lack of international response to the Circassian genocide, ethnic cleansing campaigns against Native Americans in the United States, the Herero and Namaqua genocide, or famines in Ireland or the British Raj, precisely because, like Ukrainian peasants and Kazakhs, these groups were widely perceived as backward savages incapable of improvement who deserved to be subjugated. Even so, that hardly excuses Duranty’s mendacity, as there’s no hint that he lied because he thought it useless to tell the truth.

Probably the most interesting part of the book is what happened after Duranty returned to the United States. While he still considered himself an expert on the Soviet Union, his books were often attacked by both right and left-wingers with actual moral convictions and he likewise fell out favor with the Soviet elite for his patronizing racialism about the essence of Slavs and neglecting to mention the Lockhart Plot during the Russian Civil War. (I suspect that much of the ideology of the Zhdanov doctrine also was widely at odds with nearly all of Duranty’s ideas, though Taylor doesn’t mention it.) Duranty’s post-World War II life seems to have been spent boozing, partying, and having serious financial problems. By the end of his life, he was a less a despicable figure than a sad and pathetic one who couldn’t grasp why his hero deserted him, in which, ironically, he found himself in similar straits of the likes of Nikolai Yezhov, a man he considered an inexplicable madman.

[June · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exhaustive study of the New York Times reporter who helped the Soviets cover up the Ukrainian famine. "When all is said and done, he alone, of all the witnesses to the terrible events, had sufficient prestige and prominence to exert his influence...Had Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize-winner at the peak of his celebrity, spoken out loud and clear in the pages of the New York Times, the world could not have ignored him...If Duranty had taken a stand, he might now be accounted one of the century's great, uncompromising reporters. But he did not."

The New York Times hired a consultant in 2003 who concluded the Pulitzer Board should revoke Duranty's prize.

Such an important book, but unfortunately the Seattle Public Library can't afford to have S.J. Taylor's Oxford University Press work in its permanent collection, so I had to request an interlibrary loan. Luckily, the Seattle Public Library has 38 copies of Ibram Kendi's Antiracist Baby, so I could read something while I waited.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Amazing story. More detail than I wanted.

[Karen · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book is probably good but I wasn't interested in the entire story of this person's life. I just wanted to read about the Stalin's apologist part of it.