COMMENTARY: A crippling legacy and an unconscionable decision (12/07/03)

THE 70th ANNIVERSARY OF THE FAMINE-GENOCIDE IN UKRAINE

COMMENTARY: A crippling legacy and an unconscionable decision

by Lubomyr Luciuk

It was just by chance, at the end of a very rough week. I was hurrying home, hungry, tired, stressed. It was getting dark but somehow I spotted her, sitting at a Brock Street bus stop, alone, resigned to a wait. I haven't seen very much of her in recent years. Her husband has been ill and the Ukrainian community of Kingston, at least the part of it that I grew up in, never large to start with, has shrunk, an inevitability with the passage of time. Yet I almost drove by. What changed my mind? I'm not sure. But I pulled over and offered a lift. She was grateful. The half hour or so she would have spent in transit would now pass in a few minutes. I dropped her off and went on my way, a little delayed but no matter, good deed done.

I was barely through my front door when the telephone rang. A man in Alabama, whom I do not know, wanted my reaction to the news that the Pulitzer Prize Board had just announced that it would not revoke the 1932 award given to Walter Duranty. He was The New York Times correspondent who served Soviet interests before, during and after the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine, arguably one of the greatest genocides in 20th century Europe. Publicly, Duranty dismissed all accounts of this man-made famine, going out of his way to denigrate those who risked much by reporting the growing horrors. Privately he admitted, at the British Embassy in Moscow, on September 26, 1933, that as many as 10 million people had died of hunger in the past year.

Officially, the fourth Saturday of every November, - November 22 this year - is set aside in Ukraine to hallow the memory of the many millions of innocent victims of the Terror-Famine. So the timing of the Pulitzer Prize Board's announcement could not have been more base, whether intentional or an example of profound obtuseness. Granted a unique chance to champion truth, the board's grandees instead rallied around a liar, casting themselves as the vindicators of Stalin's apologist. That they larded their manifesto with expressions of "sympathy" for those who "suffered" made their missive even more execrable. Shedding crocodile tears for the murdered places Duranty's present-day exculpators in his company, forever. They may just deserve some pity for it's a foul congregation they have joined.

Duranty knew, but didn't care, that millions were deliberately starved. This Pulitzer Board didn't care either. Instead they worried over setting a precedent that might require reviewing whether other awards were as ill-deserved as Duranty's. Are there more like him in the ranks of the Pulitzer winners? And what would be wrong with establishing such a model? If Dr. Joseph Goebbels had secured a Pulitzer in 1932 for eloquent prose about the New Order in Europe does anyone believe his prize would still stand? Is this reluctance to do what's right grounded in the fact that the victims were peasants, and Ukrainians?

When, on May Day, the campaign to have Duranty's Pulitzer Prize either revoked by the Pulitzer Board or returned by The New York Times began, our intent was to draw attention to the Holodomor, as the Great Famine is called in Ukraine. What we sowed now allows us to reap dozens of stories about the Famine-Genocide and Duranty's mendaciousness, found in mainstream newspapers published from Moscow to Montreal, Wichita to Kingston. This bountiful harvest seems to discomfort some folks. Columbia University's David Klattel alleged in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review: "Whoever funded [this campaign] spent a good deal of money." Wrong. A few thousand dollars in printing costs, certainly, but those who signed and sent in our cards paid their own postage. The remarkable volume of mail sent in signals an unambiguous expression of international revulsion at the thought that Duranty might be left grasping his unmerited Pulitzer. It is not evidence of a well-endowed global conspiracy of the sort some paranoiacs mutter about.

Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Board, has acknowledged how our efforts "significantly increased awareness of the Famine of 1932-1933." True, and we did just as much to further expose the greatest of the Famine deniers, although there was nothing new in underscoring just how perverse a scoundrel Duranty was. Everyone admits that, although, oddly, Duranty's willful prostitution of the most fundamental principle of journalism, the duty to report accurately rather than just regurgitating party propaganda, seems not to have troubled those charged with shepherding journalism's most prestigious award.

What our initiative never tried to do was "airbrush" Duranty out of history, as Bill Keller of The New York Times pleaded recently. Quite to the contrary, we want Duranty remembered for what he was, a shill for the Soviets, a man whom his contemporary, Malcolm Muggeridge, described as "the greatest liar of any journalist I have ever met." Why the Pulitzer Board would want to keep such a scamp on their honor role defies explanation. Duranty's continuing hold on a Pulitzer sullies all Pulitzers, past, present and future.

Those who made the unconscionable decision not to revoke Duranty's award will have to live with their choice. Perhaps Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, will still return this prize, or at least instruct his editors to stop listing Duranty in their annual paean to that newspaper's Pulitzer recipients, for surely no decent journalist can feel comfortable sharing this distinction with the reprobate in their midst. Or was it just naive of us to assume that those on the receiving ends of our epistles would be capable of rendering anything other than the Pharisaical findings they did?

The crippling legacy of this unparalleled horror for Ukraine, described as a post-genocidal society by Prof. James Mace, needs to be analyzed thoroughly. And bringing to justice those responsible for this communist crime against humanity, and others, must become a priority. Canada could help for some perpetrators are not only alive but here amongst us, enjoying their pensions.

As I reflect on the events of this past weekend, I am comforted by knowing that in the early evening of the day on which the Pulitzer Board soiled itself with sophistries I slowed down to give an elderly lady a ride. In doing so I showed a small kindness, perhaps the best thing I could have done on that day for a survivor of Stalinism, my godmother.

Lubomyr Luciuk is a professor of political geography at the Royal Military College of Canada.

| Home Page |