Ukraine's Suffering Highlights Pulitzer Lies

The New York Times helped to cover up a genocide; now famine looms once more

War in Ukraine and threat of famine prompt U.S. press corps to confront past lies.
Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for praising Stalin while hiding million of deaths.
Moneyed interests and their intelligence assets used the press to manipulate policy.
New York Times flattered Castro a decade before the CIA helped Fidel come to power.
U.S. State Department propagandized citizens long before Obama made it legal.
(2,200 words or about 10 minutes’ read.)

Holomodor, Kharkiv, 1933

May 17, 2022

For 90 years the U.S. media establishment has defended a man that Ukrainians regard as a criminal propagandist.

The New York Times journalist Walter Duranty covered up the starving to death of millions, flattered the dictator Josef Stalin, and was elevated to the heights of his profession, winning a Pulitzer prize.

“He is the personification of evil in journalism,” Ukrainian-American activist Oksana Piaseckyj has told an NPR reporter. “We think he was like the originator of fake news.” [1]

Duranty’s prize is the most controversial in Pulitzer’s history. Nevertheless when it was reviewed in 2003 the beadles left the award in place. Now one of the review panel, the NYT's former executive editor Bill Keller, favours pulling the Pulitzer.

What’s changed? — Ukraine is in the headlines. Famine, too.

Back in 2003 the NYT was still smarting from the lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the plagiarism scandal of Jayson Blair.

Morality bends with the zeitgeist.

A brief history of starvation

It wasn’t the first famine the Bolsheviks had caused. Within three years of seizing power the harvest of 1920 collapsed by half. By 1921 much of European Russia was in famine, lasting until 1923. Ten years later, the USSR was once again starving, the Ukraine worst hit.

The earlier famine was caused by civil war that lasted til 1923, the latter by the repression of skilled farmers, who were blamed for the disastrous failings of collective agriculture. In truth, they shared the same root.

When the Bosheviks took power, 97 per cent of the population lived in the countryside. The putschists controlled only the cities and held on to power by their fingernails. They needed control of the countryside. They declared war on the peasantry. [2]

Conventional histories say famine was an accident or unintended consequence. Event Covid should teach us better.

The Marxists’ postmodern heirs reverse the idea that ideology motivates the drive for power. Perhaps they are more honest than generations of Sovietophile academics. The American sociologist John Levi Martin argues that ideology is the “actors’ theorization of their own position, and available strategies, in a political field.”

The Bolshevik ideology of industrial progress insisted that centralized control of the economy could run things better, or at least give them power to designate the beneficiaries. Bureaucrats would follow the “imperatives” of technology.

This had less to do with Marxism-Leninism than people think. The Bolshevik leadership included hundreds of Russians, and especially Ukrainians, who had fled to the United States after the political violence of the 1880s. These progressives knew more about Frederick Taylor than Karl Marx.

Taylorism, or the theory of scientific management, including his time-and-motion studies, was cited often in the young Soviet Union. Aldous Huxley mimics this in Brave New World (1931) in which the god of religion is replaced by the deity of technological progress, with daily exclamations in praise of “Our Ford.”

This led to scientific absurdity of the Soviet bureaucrat Trofim Lysenko who believed he could teach wheat to grow in winter. He framed his ideas in Marxist terms to gain political protection and used this power to silence critics and send rival scientists to the GULAG. [3]

Lysenko’s victims were the early geneticists — in an eerie and ironic inversion.

Even worse than Lysenko are his apologists today. The Atlantic, a journal widely suspected to be close to the CIA, blames the resurgence in ideological views of science, and the beatification of Lysenko, on Russians — his victims. If you cannot see the dupicitous hand of “intelligence” or influence activities, I cannot help you. [4]

Ethnicity and accuracy

We are all humans and seek to apportion blame. We are also herd creatures and place blame outside the flock.

In the interests of strict accuracy, many of the architects of Bolshevism and the famine were Ukrainian, from the lands once known as Khazaria, and thus cross-networked to the Persian and Turkic peoples.

Meaning border land, Ukraine overlapped the borders of modern day Poland, giving us the “anarchists” who killed Tsar Alexander II which provoked the pogroms. They also gave birth to Trotsky, Radek, Khruschev and Kaganovich — these latter two were the supervisors, if not the architects, of the Holomodor, the name Ukraine gives to the politically-induced famine.

Ethnic name-calling doesn’t work. Nor does the game of playing one religion against another.

The Russian peasantry was deeply ritualistic, with life determined by observances and festivals, much of it pre-Christian Slavic folk culture overlaid with Orthodoxy.

They already practised cooperative farming. The short growing season in much of Russia makes common sense of collaboration, sharing tools and labour, as economist and former Russian finance minister Yevgeny Yasin has noted.

Yet in came the New York progressives yelling, “Wrong kind of collectivism!” The Bolsheviks appropriated what they could use from peasant culture — at one point they had children recite a daily prayer to Stalin — and liquidated the rest, or transported them to Siberia or the GULAG labour camps.

Duranty’s deception

This was the world in which Walter Duranty was appointed Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times for fourteen years (1922–1936).

Duranty wrote during the harvest of 1933: “any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”

That famine resulted in the death of between five and almost nine million people across the USSR, of whom four million were Ukrainian. A fellow Briton, Malcolm Muggeridge (Duranty was half British, half American) said in a 1982 documentary:

“He was not only the greatest liar among the journalists in Moscow, but he was the greatest liar of any journalist that I ever met in 50 years of journalism.”