Duranty's Pulitzer-winning articles: what the Times correspondent wrote (07/27/03)

Duranty's Pulitzer-winning articles: what the Times correspondent wrote

by Andrew Nynka

PARSIPPANY, N.J. - Walter Duranty was one of a handful of Western journalists working in Moscow in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His dispatches from the Soviet Union held significant sway, and in 1932 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for correspondence. The award was given for a series of reports, written in 1931, that, according to the Pulitzer Prize Board, showed "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and clarity."

The dispatches, written with a strong editorial tone, were published by The New York Times and carried a simple introduction. The articles would be "on present conditions in Russia," the newspaper wrote, while Mr. Duranty, The New York Times Moscow correspondent, was "out of Russia on a holiday in Western Europe." The paper later noted that Mr. Duranty was in Paris.

Mr. Duranty's submission to the Pulitzer Board included a total of 13 articles, 11 of which were published in The New York Times and the remaining two in The New York Times Magazine.

The articles were published in 1931 on June 14, 16, 18-20 and 22-27, while the articles that appeared in The New York Times Magazine were published on March 29 and December 20, 1931.

Mr. Duranty's articles examined the Soviet Union and Stalinism - which he made a point of differentiating from Marxism, Leninism and Communism - from an internal perspective. His articles covered the broader context of Soviet mentality - they were not written as news stories, but rather as analysis.

"Stalin had a clearer perception of Russia's possibilities and the reserves of untapped energy in her people, hardly less 'virgin' than her soil. He saw, too, that the Soviet Union was not 'one country' in the sense in which Marx wrote, but a vast self-sufficing continent far more admirably fitted by its natural configuration and resources and by the character and ways of its population for a communist experiment than what Marx prognosticated in a compact industrial state like England," he wrote. (It is important to note here that while a distinction exists between Russia and the Soviet Union, Mr. Duranty - like many writers of his day - used the terms synonymously.)

"Stalin is giving the Russian people - the Russian masses, not Westernized landlords, industrialists, bankers and intellectuals, but Russia's 150 million peasants and workers - what they really want, namely joint effort, communal effort. And communal life is as acceptable to them as it is repugnant to a Westerner," Mr. Duranty wrote in his first article, "Red Russia of Today Ruled by Stalinism, Not Communism."

Stalin abolished Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP), Mr. Duranty reported - which meant a degree of Western individualism, a spirit of personal initiative and a return to limited capitalism - "not because Stalin is so powerful or cruel and full of hate for the capitalist system as such, but because he has a flair for political management unrivaled since Charles Murphy [New York City political boss from 1902-1924] died," he noted.

The Five-Year Plan is the practical expression of Stalinism, Mr. Duranty stressed. And Stalinism - or the Bolshevik party line, according to Mr. Duranty - has the same absolute authority of any emperor. In his June 18 article, "Stalinism Shelves World Revolt Idea; To Win Russia First," Mr. Duranty called the Five-Year Plan "a force of social construction."

Mr. Duranty chided those who looked at the Five-Year Plan through a very literal lens. He wrote that "nothing could be more absurd or more wrong" to say that if the Five-Year Plan fails it will be the end of Bolshevism and that if it succeeds it will mean the end of capitalism elsewhere.

"The Five-Year Plan is nothing more or less than applied Stalinism, and its mass of bewildering figures is only the thermometer to measure the degree of heat engendered by the application of the plan, but is not otherwise intrinsically important."

So, Mr. Duranty reported, the numbers are not meant for the world to judge Russia's progress or to measure the progress of socialism. "The Five-Year Plan is something for the Russians to measure at, not for the rest of the world to measure Russians by. This sounds confusing, but it is true, and if you cannot understand it you cannot understand Russia," he explained.

Mr. Duranty reported in this first article (June 14), that "the whole purpose of the plan is to get the Russians going - that is, to make a nation of eager, conscious workers out of a nation that was a lump of sodden, driven slaves."

"Outsiders 'viewing with alarm' or hooting with disdain as they take and play with Soviet statistics might as well be twiddling their own thumbs for all it really counts. What does count is that Russia is being speeded up and fermented - and disciplined - into jumping and into making an effort and making it all together in tune to the Kremlin's music," Mr. Duranty wrote in his article "Red Russia of Today Ruled by Stalinism, Not Communism."

On one of the more controversial topics of Mr. Duranty's reporting, namely, the forced collectivization of farms, Mr. Duranty said little. Collectivization was "to bring the advantages of mechanized and organized effort to the humblest Tadzsik peasant or Kasak nomad," he wrote.

Examining the Five-Year Plan from an economic standpoint, Mr. Duranty wrote that, for the next decade at least, "agriculture will count most in Russia."

"Here, too, something other than economics enters at once - the Five-Year Plan in addition to the economic production of agriculture involves the political socialization of peasant holdings, or collective farming as it is called," Mr. Duranty reported. "Collectivization, or the political end, has been done, and it will depend largely on the weather as to how far the production program will be accomplished."

Additionally, Mr. Duranty commented on the Soviet military and how it might be used. "As to the true purpose of the Red Army and the whole gigantic scheme of military preparation, your correspondent is prepared to stake his reputation on the fact that at present it is purely defensive, and for all he can see now will be so in the future," he wrote in the June 25 article.

He continued: "Previous dispatches have shown, or tried to show, how 'self-contained' Stalinism is and how thoroughly it has adopted Voltaire's advice to 'cultivate your own garden.'"

According to Karl Marx's vision for a proletarian state, the actual majority of the population would be urban workers speaking the same language, making up a homogeneous majority that had similar needs, habits and aims, Mr. Duranty wrote. But among the Soviet Union's 160 million people there was a vast divergence of race, language, custom and culture, he noted.

"In organizing the USSR Stalin was forced to take cognizance of this anomaly from a Marxist doctrinal standpoint. He met it by a compromise. Every nationality in the union was allowed full linguistic autonomy and what might have seemed a dangerously lavish degree of cultural and political autonomy," Mr. Duranty reported.

"At first sight such an arrangement might seem to foster a spirit of petty nationalist and racial antagonism and universal disintegration - that is the exact opposite of what the Bolsheviki are trying to achieve." According to Mr. Duranty, the Bolsheviks were trying to "merge the fresh, strong currents of minor nationalism into a mighty river of pan-Sovietism."

In The New York Times Magazine article, Mr. Duranty's purposes was to analyze "the outlook of the average Russian under Soviet rule." The introduction to the March 29, 1931, piece asked: "What does the average Russian think?"

Mr. Duranty wrote that "one may venture to question ... whether they really enjoy being herded into collective farms (however more productive than their wretched little individual holdings, and however more truly contributing to their ultimate good). ... The 'average Russian' is a meek and long-suffering creature, but it cannot be denied that he is disturbed and distressed by the present violent change of his habits and life-ways."

"The 'average Russian' thinks first and most about food and clothing. The commodity shortage is so acute nowadays that what to eat and wear counts more than the fate of nations," he wrote. By "average Russians" he noted that he meant non-Communists.

In talking about the Soviet propaganda machine, Mr. Duranty explained Stalinist control over the press and radio by saying, "It may be said without fear of contradiction that the Stalinist machine is better organized for the formation and control of public opinion in a great country than anything history has hitherto known."

"It cannot be said, however, that the Kremlin abuses the terrific power of the press, the radio and Communist Party effort. Stalin may not be one of the world's great men in the sense that Lenin was, but he certainly knows his politics and has been careful to correct the dangers of unchallenged authoritative and unified control of public opinion by what is known as 'self-criticism,' which is not the least interesting feature of the Stalinist system," he wrote.

Mr. Duranty made a strong point of saying that while Soviet press censors are reasonable, the Soviet Foreign Office maintained what he called a "scratch-for-yourself mentality" in supplying foreign correspondents with information. To highlight, he wrote, "Far from the Soviet government pumping propaganda into resident correspondents the latter generally have to extract it drop by drop. ... it becomes positively infuriating to hear people abroad say: 'of course, Moscow correspondents write just what the authorities want.'"

The eighth article in the series, published on June 24, 1931, dealt mainly with the Soviet effort to put in practice Karl Marx's theory of eliminating class boundaries to create a socialist society.

"'The people who were' is a literal translation of the phrase 'byvshi lyudi' used universally to describe them. They were but are not - most of them have fled, or perished, and those who survive are living dead - phantoms of the past in the Soviet present," Mr. Duranty wrote in the article "Stalinism Smashes Foes in Marx's Name."

"'The liquidation of the kulak as a class' runs the present slogan, whose meaning in terms of reality is that 5 million human beings, 1 million families of the best and most energetic farmers are to be dispossessed, dispersed, demolished, to be literally melted or 'liquidated' into the rising flood of classless proletarians."

Mr. Duranty went on to say that he was not actually talking about killing, rather he meant destroying the individual previously known as a kulak, governor, general, gendarme, etc., in order to form a classless society. "But what, you may ask, becomes of 'the Former People,' or the kulaks or engineers thus doomed apparently to perish? Must all of them and their families be physically abolished? Of course not - they must be 'liquidated' or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian mass."

"That, reduced to its harsh essentials, is Stalinism today. It is not lovely, nor, in the outside world, of good repute, and your correspondent has no brief for or against it, nor any purpose save to try to tell the truth," Mr. Duranty wrote.

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