COMMENTARY

Recalling one correspondent's act of honesty and courage

by Ian Hunter

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.

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 Western University, was Malcolm Muggeridge's first biographer .

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, May 4, 2003, No. 18, Vol. LXXI

| Home Page |