The Holodomor and the New York Times
Josef Stalin ordered that grain quotas in the Ukraine be increased in 1932 to the point that Ukrainian peasants responsible for producing it would have none left for their own sustenance. The NKVD enforced Stalin’s policy, collecting the grain and overseeing the death by starvation of an estimated 7 million Ukrainian people as a result. Stalin’s actions were motivated by his desire to end Ukrainian nationalism.
Walter Duranty was the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his work from Moscow in 1931. In 1932 and the following year, while Stalin’s policies were leading to the deaths of so many in the Ukraine, Duranty sent back stories to the New York Times which lauded the work of the Soviet government and Josef Stalin. The New York Times was the source for much of the international news of smaller newspapers across the country, which could not afford their own overseas correspondents, and Duranty’s work was repeated nationwide.
Duranty reported on some deaths in the Ukraine, attributing them to disease rather than starvation, and described reports from other sources of the true events in the Ukraine as being nothing more than “malignant propaganda” from those hostile to the Soviet regime. Duranty’s reports denying the famine and the effects of Stalin’s policies were a major influence on government policy towards the Soviet Union, given the prestige of the New York Times.
There were obviously conflicting reports describing the famine, the numbers of people dying, and the effects of Soviet policy, but the Times denied them and stood by their correspondent. Duranty too defended his reporting against contradictory accounts appearing in British newspapers, describing them as, “…there appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union…” Duranty published his comments in a story which appeared in the Times under the headline “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving.”
Malcolm Muggeridge was the Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, a British publication which reported the events of the Holodomor as they occurred, and frequently debated with Duranty in print. In his memoirs years later, Muggeridge referred to what he called Duranty’s “persistent lying.” The New York Times wrote in 1990 that Duranty’s work from Moscow was a result of his believing in the system installed by the Communists. “He saw what he wanted to see,” wrote the Times.