FACES AND PLACES: The Duranty campaign and its aftermath (07/04/04)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

The Duranty campaign and its aftermath

Ukrainians in North America are known for the many "truth campaigns" we have launched over the years.

Months are spent in planning, weeks in implementing, but, unfortunately, only minutes are devoted to following-up. How often have we as a community written letters, protest marched, phoned, sent e-mails, only to run into a brick wall of hostility or indifference from those who were and remain unsympathetic to our legitimate concerns? Rarely do we leave behind any permanent, documented record of our efforts. Defeated, we walk away until the next time. Always the next time.

The recent "May Day" and "Red October" anti-Duranty campaigns were different. There were tangible results and there was follow-up. Both can be found in the recently published book "Not Worthy: Walter Duranty's Pulitizer Prize and The New York Times," compiled by Prof. Lubomyr Luciuk, initiator of this unique project which, among other things, generated, amazingly, some 45,000 individually signed postcards to the Pulitzer Prize Committee and to The New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.

"This book bears witness to a small crusade which, like most crusades, failed in its proximate goal," writes Prof. Roger Daniels. "Walter Duranty is still the holder of record for the Pulitzer Prize for 'foreign reporting' in 1932 ... But the crusade had a larger goal: to make the world in general and North Americans in particular, more aware of the special horrors that were inflicted on the people of Ukraine by Stalin and his henchmen. This larger goal, it seems to me, has been achieved. Hundreds of column-inches of newsprint in some of the continent's leading newspapers and abroad have been devoted to describing the anti-Duranty campaign. In the process more was published about the sufferings of the Ukrainian people in the early 1930s than in 70-odd years since they should have been, but were not, front page news in those outlets."

Dedicated to the memory of James Mace, this 270-page book contains articles by him as well as by such distinguished historians as Robert Conquest ("How Liberals Funked It") Mark von Hagen ("A Report to the New York Times") Yaroslav Bilinsky ("Was the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 Genocide?") James Crowl ("Duranty's Pulitzer: A Reflection") and Roger Daniels ("Forward").

Also included are op-ed pieces supporting the Pulitzer revocation by Eric Margolis (Toronto Sun) Andrew Stuttaford (National Review Online), Robert Fulford (The National Post), Carol Sanders (Winnipeg Free Press) and Duncan Currie (The Harvard Crimson). Many articles, columns and editorials which originally appeared in The Ukrainian Weekly are also contained in the text.

Columns and editorials objecting to the revocation are included as well. One will not be surprised to discover that the objections come from such liberal publications as the Toronto Globe and Mail (a position criticized in a letter from David Matas, senior counsel of B'Nai B'rith Canada) and the self-serving article by David McCollom of the Columbia Journalism Review, a publication which, incidentally, coordinates the work of the Pulitzer Prize Committee.

An especially revealing and lengthy inclusion is Prof. David C. Engerman's article "Modernization from the Other Shore: American Observers and the Costs of Soviet Economic Development," which appeared in the liberal American Historical Review in 2000. Writing in the typically wooly and woeful academic style of many American historians, Prof. Engerman dismisses the writings of Prof. Conquest and "émigré Ukrainians," who claimed "that Soviet leaders planned the famine to satisfy genocidal desires to punish Ukrainians for their nationalist aspirations." Dr. Engerman will have none of that, arguing that a "new paradigm" has emerged among academics - American scholars are always seeking "new paradigms" - which seek to understand the "Soviet famine" in economic rather than political terms.

Apparently the thought never occurs to these new paradigm types that the Ukrainian Famine was both economic and political, a "twofer" for Stalin who was able to pilfer grain from the Ukrainian countryside in order to gain sorely needed valuta for industrial expansion while at the same time destroying the Ukrainian village, traditionally the wellspring of Ukrainian national consciousness.

Like most publications of the Kashtan Press, this book is worth every penny of its minimal cost. Buy it, read it and contribute it to a young reporter on your local newspaper staff for review. Another possibility for donation is your local university's school of journalism.

Copies are available in the United States for $25 (plus $2.50 for shipping) from Ukrainian Educational Associates, 107 Ilehamwood Drive, DeKalb, IL 60115-1856. Copies are also available for the same price from Kashtan Press, 22 Gretna Green, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, K7M 3J2.

Myron Kuropas's e-mail address is: [email protected].

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