PERSPECTIVES: The Pulitzer: two worthy winners (05/02/04)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

The Pulitzer: two worthy winners

Ukrainians and others concerned about journalistic integrity have a major grievance with the Pulitzer Prize Committee: the 1932 prize awarded to The New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty for his reporting on the Soviet Union's first Five-Year Plan. One of the principal features of the Plan was the brutal collectivization campaign that culminated in 1932 with the horrendous Famine-Genocide, the Holodomor.

Honored as one of America's top journalists, Duranty might as well have been working for the Soviet Ministry of Propaganda. According to a 1931 State Department memo, he told an American diplomat that his reports "always reflect the official position of the Soviet government and not his own." Since everything the Soviet government said or did originated with Joseph Stalin, you could say that, perversely, Stalin was the real winner of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize. Certainly, Duranty parroted Stalin's line both before and after he won the coveted journalism award.

Right now, though, I'd like to focus on this year's prizes and commend the Pulitzer Committee for its choices for general non-fiction, where Anne Applebaum of The Washington Post won for "Gulag, A History:"and for Biography, where Amherst Prof. William Taubman won for "Khrushchev, the Man and his Era."

My fellow-columnist, Myron Kuropas has already written a glowing review of "Gulag, A History." I share his opinion of Ms. Applebaum's monumental study. It not only documents the history of the slave labor network known as the gulag, but also describes in meticulous detail its specific mores, hierarchy, literature, customs, national, religious and class structure, etc.

As Ms. Applebaum points out, Tsarist Russia had a long legacy of slave labor. The gulag, though, is uniquely identified with the Soviet Union. The first prisoners were sent there in 1918, just weeks after the Bolshevik putsch. It was Lenin himself who directed the establishment of concentration camps, which became a permanent feature of Soviet political and economic reality.

Like the Nazis, the Soviets targeted people not for what they did but for who they were: "class enemies," "kulaks," "bourgeois nationalists." Over its 70 years, Ms. Applebaum estimates the gulag population at 28.7 million victims. Innocent of anything normally considered a crime, they worked in brutally cold conditions, undernourished and in the depths of despair, constructing Siberia's mineral industry, a major source of Russia's revenue today. The slaves who developed that resource remain unacknowledged - no official memorials, no apologies, no criminal trials for the perpetrators.

Deporting millions of people from their homes to labor camps as many as 11 times zone away was an enormous logistical challenge, requiring armies of police, barbed wire and handcuff manufacturers, torturers, bureaucrats, train operators, guards, cooks, dog handlers, etc. And they needed managers.

Among the most able was Nikita Khrushchev. Today, he's largely remembered as the buffoon who used his shoe to hammer at the United Nations General Assembly podium or the leader who went eyeball to eyeball with President John F. Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Prof. Taubman's book has a much broader scope. Almost uniquely among English-language biographies of Soviet leaders, it puts Khrushchev squarely into the context of 20th century Ukraine. Ethnically Russian, Khrushchev grew up in what is today Donetsk. Siding with the winning Bolsheviks during the Revolution, he became a party functionary there before moving in 1928 to Kharkiv and then Kyiv.

A year later, just as the agony of the first Five-Year Plan was beginning, Khrushchev moved to Moscow. Lazar Kaganovich, boss of Soviet Ukraine and soon to be architect of the genocidal Famine, recommended him to Stalin as someone who got things done. Appointed head of the Moscow Party, Khrushchev achieved enormous success, developing that city's infrastructure, most notably the subway, using the same methods the pharaohs used to build the pyramids.

Pleased with Khrushchev's achievements, Stalin sent him back to Kyiv in 1938 to finish the purge of "bourgeois nationalists" begun nearly a decade earlier and to implement an aggressive Russification policy. Prof. Taubman describes Khrushchev as "lashing out at 'Polish-German agents and bourgeois nationalists' ... who did everything they could to toss out Russian from Ukrainian schools." He presided over tens of thousands of arrests and executions.

Khrushchev remained in charge of Ukraine during the critical World War II years and then led the post-war battle against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which was fighting for independence. He also led a related campaign to destroy the Ukrainian Catholic Church. Both entailed gut-wrenching methods - mass arrests, torture, medical assassinations, executions and wholesale deportations to the gulag.

Ironically, these deportations proved to be a key factor in the decline of the gulag. Appalled by the slavery they saw everywhere, the tough, well-organized UPA guerrillas, rose up in massive revolts. Alarmed, the Soviet authorities responded by drastically scaling back the camp population, a story Ms. Applebaum tells in fascinating detail.

Khrushchev, who played a role in the decision to reduce the roll of the slave labor camps, ultimately became the Soviet ruler after Stalin's death in 1953. In 1956 he caused a sensation by denouncing Stalin in a secret speech to the Communist Party. (Interestingly, many of the files from Khrushchev's purges in Kyiv disappeared around that time.) In the end, Khrushchev was toppled from power and died in 1971, an obscure and nearly forgotten pensioner. In an immensely readable account, Prof. Taubman does an admirable job describing the combination of cynical cruelty and political decency that allowed Khrushchev to both collaborate in Stalin's crimes in the 1930s and '40s and then take bold steps in the '50s and '60s to turn the Soviet State away from the sadistic madness that had consumed so many innocent lives.

The Pulitzer Prize Committee has come a long way since the 1930s, when they honored Walter Duranty at the same time he was actively working as Stalin's apologist. Anne Applebaum and William Taubman's books help to lift the rocks on that horrible time and expose the appalling truth, the enormity of which cannot be encompassed in two books, no matter how good. Still, they're a great contribution. So, two cheers to the Pulitzer Committee for these awards and a hearty boo to them for continuing to maintain Duranty's 1932 journalism prize.

Andrew Fedynsky's e-mail address is: [email protected].

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