Stalin's Spin Doctors: The American Press and Stalin - 1932-1941
The role that the American press played in the American attitudes toward Stalin in the 1930s and early 1940s is a controversial and conflicting one. The conflict between journalists Walter Duranty and Malcomb Muggeridge is set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the 1932-1933 Ukrainian famine. Undercurrents of the story revolve around Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin and how they built a relationship that would shape the contours of World War II and establish the parameters of the Cold War.
Controversy still swirls around the origins and numbers involved in the Ukrainian famine and whether the Russian dead are between five and six million or as high as 14 million, as historian Robert Conquest estimated. Duranty’s connection with FDR and his impact on the Soviet recognition question are a lesser-known part of the story. How much the journalistic battle between Duranty and Muggeridge influenced Roosevelt’s attitude toward Stalin and his communist regime is worth examining in the light of FDR’s penchant to take the politically expedient road.
Is Duranty the evil genius and manipulator that Andrew Stuttaford sketches in his National Review Article? Stuttaford states that in 1974, Joseph Alsop used his final syndicated column to call Duranty’s pro Stalinist stance into question. Robert Conquest’s books focus the historical spotlight on what he terms Duranty’s biased reporting in Stalin’s favor.1
In 1990, S.J. Taylor published her biography of Duranty entitled Stalin’s Apologist, in which she states that Duranty lied about the Ukrainian famine and that his reporting about Russia was eventually discredited. The New York Times printed a favorable review of Taylor’s book and in the review The Times commented editorially that Duranty’s reporting had been “some of the worst reporting to appear in the newspaper,” especially his “lapse” in covering the Ukrainian famine. 2
Although Stuttaford and others have demanded that the New York Times revoke Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize, his name still remains near the top of the list of New York Times Pulitzer winners. 3 Was Duranty merely an opportunist in the right place in the right era so that he could be a conduit between Stalin and Roosevelt? Would the diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union been inevitable, with or without Duranty?
America attitudes toward Russia fluctuated with momentous 20th Century events like World War I and the Communist Revolution. After World War I, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer presided over “the Red Scare” in America where many people were presumed guilty of being a communist until proven innocent. In 1918, American and British troops had invaded and briefly occupied Siberia and the Communist Revolution in Russia had created waves of reaction in the United States. In the 1920s and 1930s, many Americans were terrified of being termed Communist while others wooed the title. John Reed and Louise Bryant lived in Russia and both wrote about the Russian Revolution. Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World earned him international fame and a burial place in the Kremlin, one of the few Americans to be so honored.
The world-wide Depression in 1929 and the 1930s created a favorable climate for Communist admirers in America. Thousands of unemployed Americans immigrated to Russia to work in the bustling factories and mines that burgeoning industrialization kept humming and devouring workers. To some the Communist system worked because it created jobs. To others, the Communist ideology with its focus on the worker and what they perceived as social equality was the siren call. English born and educated, Walter Duranty, was one of the Western journalists who admired Communism and wrote glowingly about Stalin’s Five Year plan from his vantage point in Moscow. In 1932, Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize, the very first Pulitzer for the New York Times, for the best news correspondence of the year. The Pulitzer Committee especially mentioned “those dispatches dealing with the Five-Year Plan.” 4
Duranty saw great potential in Russia and much leadership ability in Stalin. At least in the beginning of his career, he sincerely believed that the Communist economic methods would work best to bring Russia into the modern world. Besides being an ideological believer, he also recognized that his own career ambitions could comfortably rise alongside the stars of Josef Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt faced an Everest of difficult decisions when he took office in March 1933. In November 1933, he made the crucial decision to grant the Soviet Union diplomatic recognition. FDR based his decision partially on the input of Duranty who in his New York Times dispatches communicated a controversial perspective of the famine in the Ukrainian sector of the Soviet Union. Duranty’s favorable stories about Stalin helped convince Roosevelt to grant diplomatic recognition to Russia and cemented a relationship between Roosevelt and Stalin that would endure through the pivotal events of World War II.
In November of 1933, Duranty triumphantly traveled to the United States with Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Commissar for foreign affairs. He wrote a story announcing that after sixteen years and nine days of Soviet government existence, the United States had diplomatically recognized the U.S.S.R. at ten minutes before midnight on November 16, 1933. Maxim Litvinoff, exchanged letters and a memorandum with FDR and William C. Bullitt of Philadelphia, special assistant to the Secretary of State, was appointed as the first American Ambassador to Russia.
According to Duranty’s story, the Soviet Government pledged to abstain from Bolshevist propaganda and guaranteed Americans in Russia freedom of worship. Russia gave Americans brought to trail in the U.S.S.R. “the right to be represented by counsel of their choice.” 5
The first diplomatic exchanges between the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. included addressing the matters of debts and claims concerning the two countries. The Russians agreed to waive claims against the America Expeditionary Force in Siberia, but did not mention the American Expeditionary Force in Murmansk which indicated to Duranty that the Soviets probably intended to press that claim. Duranty quoted the president’s remarks that he read to about 200 newspapermen from his study in the White House. He noted that the “final phrase in the President’s letter is for the preservation of the peace of the world.” 6
Stalin granted Duranty an hour-long interview in late December of 1933. The New York Times printed the interview on its front page, and other papers summarized it. The Soviet Foreign office commented that Stalin did not often give interviews, but he made an exception for W. Duranty. 7 American liberals also applauded Duranty George Seldes, Alvin Adey , and Alexander Woollcott thought Duranty to be unsurpassed in his knowledge and understanding of Russia. Woollcott wrote that the applause at the banquet held in late 1933 at the Waldorf Astoria to celebrate the United States recognition of the USSR seemed to recognize both Russia and Walter Duranty. 8
The Nation, which published a yearly honor roll of citizens and institutions awarded the 1933 honors to The New York Times for printing and Walter Duranty for writing, during the previous decade and half of Soviet rule, “the most enlightening, dispassionate and readable dispatches from a great nation in the making which appeared in any newspaper in the world.” 9 In the 1930s, The Nation, under editor Freida Kerchival, seemed to go along with the Soviet party line, especially when its Moscow correspondent, Louis Fischer echoed Walter Durranty’s views that the Ukrainian famine had not happened. A reporter for the chain of newspapers that William Randolph Hearst owned, Thomas Walker, published a series of stories bringing the Ukrainian famine to public attention. The series featured poignant photographs of starving peasants. Fischer denied the famine’s reality and charged that Hearst had published the stories to discredit the Soviet Union. While speaking to a college audience in Oakland, California, he emphatically stated, “There is no starvation in Russia. 10
But not everyone respected or believed Walter Duranty or Louis Fischer’s version of the famine. On November 18, 1933, the day after the New York Times story by Duranty announced the diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union, a parade of people, many of them Ukrainian, marched up Fifth Avenue to Thirty-fourth Street in New York City to protest what they considered Stalin’s orchestrated murder of millions of Ukrainians. The police estimated that 5,000 people gathered at the meeting place on Eighth Avenue. 11
Fellow journalists like Malcom Muggeridge, Soviet reporter for the Manchester Guardian, who reported from Russia the same time did not honor Duranty or consider him knowledgeable. Muggeridge charged that Duranty lied in and out of print, and thirty years later still alleged that Duranty deliberately suppressed the famine story so that the U.S.S.R.’s chances of diplomatic recognition by the United States would not be compromised. Journalists besides Muggeridge reporting on the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s saw mass starvation in Russia, which Stalin created to crush millions of peasants resisting collectivization. Duranty filed dispatches countering these reports. At first he told The Times that there was no famine anywhere, although “partial crop failures” occurred in some regions.” 12
When Communists stripped the farmers of their harvest, Duranty acknowledged that there was a shortage of food, but said that “there is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be.” Later in a private interview, he admitted that many Ukrainians had died, but not as many as others had reported in the American press.13
According to Duranty, if food shortages did happen, the peasants created them by fleeing from their villages to towns, leaving the harvest in the fields. . Duranty thought exaggerating the situation would be a mistake:
The Russians have tightened their belts before to a far greater extent than is likely to be needed this winter. If there is no international disturbance to complicate matters, remedies doubtless will be found and the Soviet program though menaced and perhaps retarded, will not be seriously affected. 14
Then Malcolm Muggeridge decided to see if he could break Duranty’s blockading of the truth. Muggeridge and his wife Kitty spent the fall and winter of 1932-1933 in Moscow. Without permission, Muggeridge boarded a train and traveled through the Ukraine and North Caucusus. What he observed in what formerly had been the bread basket of the Soviet Union, he never forgot. He wrote a series of articles and smuggled them out of the country in a diplomatic pouch. In his articles he described millions of peasants dying, some in sight of full granaries guarded by the army and the police.
One of his first dispatches about the famine appeared in the Manchester Guardian in March 1933:
The population is starving. “Hunger’ was the word I heard most. Peasants begged a lift on the train from one station to another, sometimes their bodies swollen up – a disagreeable sight – from lack of food. . . The little towns and villages seemed just numb and the people in too desperate a condition even actively to resent what had happened. . . Cattle and horse dead; fields neglected; meager harvest despite moderately good climatic conditions; all the grain that was produced taken by the government now no bread at all, no bread anywhere, nothing much else either; despair and bewilderment. 15
Soviet sympathizers attacked Muggeridge’s articles and Moscow discouraged journalists from visiting the Ukraine. Frederick Birchall, reporter for the New York Times in Berlin, reported on August 24 that a correspondent in another capital had applied for a tourist visa in the Soviet Union. He was denied his visa because the Soviet Union said that journalists were forbidden to travel as tourists. A Moscow-based American correspondent had applied for a visa to return there by way of Odessa . The Soviet Union told him the only way he could obtain a visa was to promise “not to leave the train en route.” 16
His assignment in the Soviet Union convinced Muggeridge that Communism did not hold the answers to the problems of the world. Muggeridge called Duranty’s collective reporting from the Soviet Union an “Essay in untruth”, and marveled satirically that “. . .Mr. Duranty has – to use one of his favorite expressions –‘gotten away with it.’ Readers of The New York Times adore him; the Brain Trust and Dictatorship of the Proletariat have lain down together, and Mr. Duranty has led them; his name is honored amongst the righteous in all parts of the world. . .17
Another Manchester Guardian reporter, Gareth Jones, traveled to the Ukraine and reported about the famine. He got around the ban on journalists by packing a knapsack with as much tinned food as he could carry and went out into the villages of the Kharkiv region on foot. Everywhere he went he saw people dying. He wrote:
In each village I received the same information – namely, that many were dying of famine and that about four-fifths of the cattle and the horses had perished…Nor shall I forget the swollen stomachs of the children in the cottages in which I slept. 18
Quickly, Duranty discounted the stories by implying that British sources had inspired Jones’s story in retaliation for the Soviet arrest of six Englishmen working on construction projects in the USSR. He went on to justify the famine:
But – to put it brutally – you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, and the Bolshevist leaders are just as indifferent to the casualties that may be involved in their drive toward socialization as any general during the world war who ordered a costly attack to show his superiors that he and his division possessed the proper soldierly spirit. In fact, the Bolsheviki are more indifferent, because they are animated by fanatical convictions. 19
United Press Moscow correspondent Eugene Lyons recalled Soviet censor Konstantin Umansky meeting with the American press corps in a reporter’s hotel room. Umansky knew that the reporters all wanted to cover the story of the show trial of the British engineers. Lyons wrote that competitive journalism forced the reporters to vie for Russian favor and he knew that making an issue of the famine at this point would be professional suicide. The reporters bargained for a gentleman’s agreement. Lyons said,
We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that damned Jones as a liar.
The filthy business being disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski. Umansky joined in the celebration, and the party did not break up until the early morning hours. 20
Duranty continued to downplay the effects of the famine. He traveled through the heart of the Ukraine and in a series of articles, he scoffed at the supposed famine. On September 17, he assured his readers that the harvest was splendid and talk of famine was ridiculous. 21 On September 19, Duranty concluded his articles by summing up his impressions of a ten day trip through the North Caucasus and Ukraine. “I repeat the opinion that the decisive engagement in the struggle for rural socialization has been won by the Kremlin. The cost in some places has been heavy, but a generally excellent crop is already mitigating conditions to a marked extent.” 22
Historian Robert Conquest in a study of the Great Famine called The Harvest of Sorrow, and in his testimony before the 1986 Famine Commission says that the events of the famine have not yet fully registered in the Western consciousness. There is a general knowledge that a catastrophe happened in the Soviet countryside, but the details of this catastrophe are unfamiliar to Westerners. Conquest argues that the famine meant herding the surviving Kulaks into collective farms. In 1932, 1933, the Russian government crushed the collectivized peasantry of the Ukraine and adjacent regions by seizing the whole grain crop and starving the villages. Conquest argues that the Stalinist government made a great effort to conceal or deny the facts of the famine and he says that “right from the start, when the truth came out from a variety of sources, the Stalinist assertion of a different story confused the issue and some Western journalists and scholars were duped or suborned into supporting the Stalinist version. “ 23
William Henry Chamberlin was the Christian Science Monitor’s Moscow correspondent for ten years and in 1934 when he was reassigned to the Far East, he wrote an account of the Great Famine in the Ukraine. His story appeared in the May 29, 1934 issue of the Christian Science Monitor. He commented on the scope of the famine by saying that he had visited three widely separated regions of Ukraine and the North Caucasus – Poltava and Byelaya Tserkov and Korpotkin in the North Caucasus – and heard mortality estimate from Soviet and collective farm presidents as ranging around ten percent. He continued:
If one considers that the population of Ukraine is about 35 million and that of the North Caucasus about 10 million and that credible reports of similar famine came from part of the country which I did not visit… it would seem highly probable that between 4 million and 5 million people over and above the normal mortality rate, lost their lives from hunger and related causes. This is in reality behind the innocuous phrases, tolerated by the Soviet censorship, about food stringency, strained food situation, etc..24
Chamberlain speculated about the motivation for the famine. He said that it was not a result of any natural disaster such as a drought or flood because the peasants had told him that the harvest of 1932, while not highly satisfactory, would have sustained them if the state had not requisitioned it. He concluded his story by remarking that the Soviet government along with the other countries of the Kellogg pact, renounced war as an instrument of national policy, but he continued that “there are no humanitarian restrictions in the ruthless class war which in the name of socialism, it has been waging on a considerable part of its own peasant population; and it has employed famine as an instrument of national policy on an unprecedented scale and in an unprecedented way.” 25
According to dispatches in the National Archives, Dr. P.C. Hiebert, head of the Mennonite Central Committee of émigré German Mennonites asked Senator Arthur Capper from Kansas to bring the famine question to the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Foreshadowing future refugee policy, FDR passed the matter on to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. In a tacit admission that there was indeed a famine, Secretary Hull replied, “Unfortunately, there do not appear to be any measures which this Government may appropriately take at this time in order to alleviate the suffering of these unhappy people.” 26
Along with other European nations, Italy had stationed a consulate in the Ukrainian capital. Representatives of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Rome discovered some telling documents, underlined with blue pencil in the style of Benito Mussolini. One of them, dated May 31, 1933, read:
Re: The Famine and The Urkainian Question. According to Consul Gradenigo, there was no doubt that the famine was artificial, designed to “change the ethnic material in the Ukraine, and intended to solve the Ukrainian problem once and for all. 27 In October 1933, American diplomats from the U.S. Embassy to Greece sent the State Department documents that proved that the USSR had confirmed the truth of the famine. In November 1933, America extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union.
A New York Times story in December 1933 revealed Duranty’s real motivation for ridiculing the famine stories. After a government announcement that Soviet grain collections had been completed two and one half months earlier than ever before, Duranty wrote:
This result, fully justifies the optimism expressed to the writer by local authorities during his September
trip through the Ukraine and North Caucasus-optimism that contrasted so strikingly with the famine stories then current in Berlin, Riga, Vienna and other places, where elements hostile to the Soviet Union were making an 11th hour attempt to avert American recognition by picturing the Soviet Union as a land of ruin and despair. 28
But the people back home in the United States and more importantly his boss Carr Van Anda at the New York Times believed Duranty’s assessment of the famine. In 1932, the same year Duranty won the Pulitzer, Governor of New York Franklin Delano Roosevelt campaigned for the presidency of the United States. People who wanted diplomatic recognition for Russia believed it would happen if Roosevelt won the election. Since by all appearances Duranty was the authority on Russia, in late July, FDR publicly invited him to lunch at the governor’s mansion to talk about Soviet gold production. He asked Duranty if he thought that Russia would be able to pay for the trade concessions that went along with official recognition. 29
Duranty’s biographer, S.J. Taylor, affirmed his self- important estimate of his influence in winning diplomatic recognition for the Soviet Union. Taylor tells Duranty’s version of the moment when he stood with the reporters in FDR’s office, just after FDR had announced American recognition of Soviet Russia. Duranty said:
As everybody was walking out, he held me back for a moment and said cordially, “Well, don’t you think it’s a good job?”
I felt proud and pleased, because for seven or eight years I had been trying, had been doing, all I could toward bringing about a Russian-American rapprochement and understanding. I felt I had some small, definite share in it. I supposed it was the greatest satisfaction I have ever had.” 30
After this diplomatic coup, Duranty occupied himself with reporting the show trials that Stalin staged in the purges of the late 1930s and insisting that everyone found guilty in the trials had to be guilty because Stalin would not punish innocent people. Eventually, the New York Times did not print his stories as readily as it once did, because word of Duranty’s lack of credibility finally had reached the editorial rooms. The Nazi Soviet pact estranged Russia from the Allies and neutralized any remaining claims to diplomatic fame that Duranty might have possessed.
Just nine years later, two confidential memos that FDR kept locked in his secret safe file revealed how far the United States had gone to insure that its ally the Soviet Union, which it had just diplomatically recognized just eight years ago in 1933 could withstand the German onslaught in 1941. The first document is a memo from Harry Hopkins, FDR’s personal representative, whom he sent to a Moscow conference with Stalin and Litvinov. Hopkins summarized Stalin’s current analysis of the war between Germany and Russia.
Stalin declared that he could mobilize 350 divisions and would have that many divisions under arms by the time the spring campaign began in May 1942. He said that he was anxious to have as many of his divisions as possible in contact with the enemy, because “then the troops learn that Germans can be killed and are not super men.” According to Stalin, killing Germans gave his men confidence and he said that his soldiers did not consider the battle lost merely because the German broke through Russian lines. The Russian mechanized forces attacked at another point and often moved many miles behind the German line. The Russian soldiers Stalin said, fight behind the Germans, are adept at the use of cover, and fight their way out in the night. He said, “Even the German tanks run out of petrol.” 31
A memo dated October 13, 1941, a mere four months after the German invasion of Russia, is a direct communication from FDR to Stalin. In this memo sent via Navy Radio, FDR informed Stalin that the United States was shipping tanks, bombers, 5,500 trucks and large amounts of barbed wire during October. “All other military supplies we promised for October are being swiftly assembled to be placed on ships.” 32
Roosevelt told Stalin that three ships had left the United States bound for Russian ports the day before and that every effort was being made to rush other supplies. In another memo dated October 30, 1941 Roosevelt advised Stalin that he had ordered all financial obstacles to be removed from an immediate loan in the value of one billion dollars to be made under the Lend Lease Act. He wrote, “I propose, subject to the approval of the government of the U.S.S.R., that no interest be charged on the indebtedness as a result of these shipments and that the payments on such begin only five years from the conclusion of the war and completed over a period of ten years thereafter…” Roosevelt ended this reassuring letter by encouraging Stalin to get in touch with him directly if the occasion required it. 33
On November 4, 1941 Stalin replied to the president. He thanked Roosevelt for granting the Soviet Union a loan in the amount of one billion dollars at no interest charges and to pay for armaments and raw materials. He said, “I agree completely, on behalf of the Government of the Soviet Union, with the conditions which you outline for this loan to the Soviet Union, namely that payment on the loan shall begin five years after the end of the war and shall be completed during the following ten year period.. .” 34
A week after Pearl Harbor, the House of Representatives passed a national defense appropriation bill to the tune of $8,243,839,031, and according to Time Magazine, about $78,000 of this sum was earmarked for Russian lend lease. Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Reverend Charles E. Coughlin predicted in his magazine Social Justice, that “Karl Marx will win this war.” 35
About two weeks after Pearl Harbor, publishers Simon and Schuster brought out a book called Mission to Moscow by former ambassador to Russia, Joseph Davies. The book was favorable to Stalin and echoed Walter Duranty’s view that the show trials revealed that the defendants were guilty and Stalin’s views were correct. It completely endorsed Soviet foreign policy.
History’s assessment of Walter Duranty has not been kind. His biographer S.J. Taylor and historian Robert Conquest have written convincingly that he deliberately lied about the Russian famine. During the Stalin years in Russia before World War II, the American press was ambiguous at best and biased at worse in reporting the excesses of Stalinist Russia.
Some historians have not been kind to the Roosevelt Stalin relationship either. In a hard-hitting revisionist history of Roosevelt's foreign policy, A Not So Grand Alliance, 1943-1945, historian Amos Perlmutter explores Roosevelt’s alliance with Stalin. He was the first Western scholar that the Russian government gave access to key foreign ministry documents recently declassified in the former Soviet Union. Perlmutter provides a portrait of a popular leader whose failure to comprehend Stalin’s long range goals had devastating results for the postwar world.
The United States probably would have granted diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union whether or not Walter Duranty was involved, but Duranty was in the right country at the right time and helped move the process along. Many of Duranty’s colleagues believed him to be naïve and one-sided in his assessments of the Soviet Union and reading his dispatches about the Ukrainian famine seems to bear out their opinions. But it can be said in Duranty’s defense that many thousands of his fellow Englishmen and Americans were just as naïve, including FDR himself in many respects. The American press proved that it was indeed, free, in the scope and diversity of its reporting about the Stalinist era.
END NOTES
1 Andrew Stuttaford in National Review Online. http://www.nationalreview.com/contributors/stuttaford051501.snitm
2 Walter Duranty, Duranty Reports Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1934), 362.
3 Andrew Stuttaford in National Review Online.
http://www.nationalreview.com/contributors/stuttaford051501.snitm
4 S. J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man in Moscow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 182.
5 The New York Times, November 17, 1933.
6 The New York Times, November 17, 1933.
7 The New York Times, December 28, 1933.
8 Alexander Woollcott, Duranty Reports Russia (New York: 1934) Preface.
9 George Seldes, Freedom of the Press (New York, 1936) ,341.
10 Louis Fischer, “Hearst’s Russian “Famine,” The Nation March 14, 1935 p. 296.
11 The Great Famine-Genocide in Soviet Ukraine, 1932-1933. Website. http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/1986/448021.smith
12 Harrison Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor (New York: Times Books, 1980) 464.
13 The New York Times, November 25, 1932.
14 Ibid.
15 The Manchester Guardian, March 27, 1933.
16 The New York Times, August 25, 1933.
17 Malcolm Muggeridge, “Any Essay in Untruth,” The English Review, Vol. LIX (October 1934), pp. 500-502.
18 The Manchester Guardian, May 8, 1933.
19 The New York Times, March 31, 1933. Actually, the omelet remark did not originate with Walter Duranty. French revolutionary Maximilian Robespierre declared in 1790, “One cannot expect to make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
20Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (New York, 1937),575.
21The New York Times, September 18, 1933.
22 The New York Times, September 20, 1933.
23 Conquests statement before the famine commission. Website. http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/1986/448021.smith
24 The Christian Science Monitor, May 29, 1934.
25 The Christian Science Monitor, May 29, 1934.
26 Ukrainian Daily Newspaper, The Day, May 31, 1933.
27 Ibid.
28 The New York Times, December 17, 1933.
29 Walter Duranty, I Write As I Please (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935)
30William Seabrook and Walter Duranty, “You’re Telling Me!” The American Magazine, July 1936, p. 54.
31 Memo from Hopkins, August 20, 1941. Roosevelt Library Digital Archives. Website.
http://www.honorary.manst.edu/psi/box5/ao1wo2.httm
32 Memo, FDR Stalin 10/13/41. Franklin Roosevelt Digital Archives, Roosevelt Library
Website/ http://www.honorary.manst.edu/psi/box5/ao1wo2.httm
33 Ibid.
34 Stalin to Roosevelt, November 4, 1941. Roosevelt Library Digital Archives. Website.
http://www.honorary.manst.edu/psi/obx5/ao1wo2.httm
35 Social Justice, December 22, 1941. P. 4
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Manuscript Collections
Roosevelt Library Digital Archives.
Books
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: Viking press, 1934.
Duranty, Walter. I Write As I Please. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935.
Getty, Arch and Manning, Robert T., ed. Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Lyons, Eugene. Assignment in Utopia. New York, 1937.
Salisbury, Harrison. Without Fear or Favor. New York: Times Books, 1980.
Seldes, George. Freedom of the Press. New York, 1936.
Taylor, S.J. Stalin’s Apologist, Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man In Moscow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Thurston, Robert W. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996.
Journals
The English Review
Magazines
The American Magazine
National Review Online
The Nation
Social Justice
Newspapers
The New York Times The Manchester Guardian
The Christian Science Monitor
Ukrainian Daily Newspaper
Websites
National Review Online
http://www.nationalreview.com/contributors/stuttaford051501.snitm
Library of Congress Soviet Archives Exhibit
http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive1986/44802.smith
Ukrainian Archives
http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/1986/448021.smith
Roosevelt Library Digital Archives
http://www.honorary.manst.edu/psi/box5/ao1wo2.httm
Controversy still swirls around the origins and numbers involved in the Ukrainian famine and whether the Russian dead are between five and six million or as high as 14 million, as historian Robert Conquest estimated. Duranty’s connection with FDR and his impact on the Soviet recognition question are a lesser-known part of the story. How much the journalistic battle between Duranty and Muggeridge influenced Roosevelt’s attitude toward Stalin and his communist regime is worth examining in the light of FDR’s penchant to take the politically expedient road.
Is Duranty the evil genius and manipulator that Andrew Stuttaford sketches in his National Review Article? Stuttaford states that in 1974, Joseph Alsop used his final syndicated column to call Duranty’s pro Stalinist stance into question. Robert Conquest’s books focus the historical spotlight on what he terms Duranty’s biased reporting in Stalin’s favor.1
In 1990, S.J. Taylor published her biography of Duranty entitled Stalin’s Apologist, in which she states that Duranty lied about the Ukrainian famine and that his reporting about Russia was eventually discredited. The New York Times printed a favorable review of Taylor’s book and in the review The Times commented editorially that Duranty’s reporting had been “some of the worst reporting to appear in the newspaper,” especially his “lapse” in covering the Ukrainian famine. 2
Although Stuttaford and others have demanded that the New York Times revoke Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize, his name still remains near the top of the list of New York Times Pulitzer winners. 3 Was Duranty merely an opportunist in the right place in the right era so that he could be a conduit between Stalin and Roosevelt? Would the diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union been inevitable, with or without Duranty?
America attitudes toward Russia fluctuated with momentous 20th Century events like World War I and the Communist Revolution. After World War I, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer presided over “the Red Scare” in America where many people were presumed guilty of being a communist until proven innocent. In 1918, American and British troops had invaded and briefly occupied Siberia and the Communist Revolution in Russia had created waves of reaction in the United States. In the 1920s and 1930s, many Americans were terrified of being termed Communist while others wooed the title. John Reed and Louise Bryant lived in Russia and both wrote about the Russian Revolution. Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World earned him international fame and a burial place in the Kremlin, one of the few Americans to be so honored.
The world-wide Depression in 1929 and the 1930s created a favorable climate for Communist admirers in America. Thousands of unemployed Americans immigrated to Russia to work in the bustling factories and mines that burgeoning industrialization kept humming and devouring workers. To some the Communist system worked because it created jobs. To others, the Communist ideology with its focus on the worker and what they perceived as social equality was the siren call. English born and educated, Walter Duranty, was one of the Western journalists who admired Communism and wrote glowingly about Stalin’s Five Year plan from his vantage point in Moscow. In 1932, Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize, the very first Pulitzer for the New York Times, for the best news correspondence of the year. The Pulitzer Committee especially mentioned “those dispatches dealing with the Five-Year Plan.” 4
Duranty saw great potential in Russia and much leadership ability in Stalin. At least in the beginning of his career, he sincerely believed that the Communist economic methods would work best to bring Russia into the modern world. Besides being an ideological believer, he also recognized that his own career ambitions could comfortably rise alongside the stars of Josef Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt faced an Everest of difficult decisions when he took office in March 1933. In November 1933, he made the crucial decision to grant the Soviet Union diplomatic recognition. FDR based his decision partially on the input of Duranty who in his New York Times dispatches communicated a controversial perspective of the famine in the Ukrainian sector of the Soviet Union. Duranty’s favorable stories about Stalin helped convince Roosevelt to grant diplomatic recognition to Russia and cemented a relationship between Roosevelt and Stalin that would endure through the pivotal events of World War II.
In November of 1933, Duranty triumphantly traveled to the United States with Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Commissar for foreign affairs. He wrote a story announcing that after sixteen years and nine days of Soviet government existence, the United States had diplomatically recognized the U.S.S.R. at ten minutes before midnight on November 16, 1933. Maxim Litvinoff, exchanged letters and a memorandum with FDR and William C. Bullitt of Philadelphia, special assistant to the Secretary of State, was appointed as the first American Ambassador to Russia.
According to Duranty’s story, the Soviet Government pledged to abstain from Bolshevist propaganda and guaranteed Americans in Russia freedom of worship. Russia gave Americans brought to trail in the U.S.S.R. “the right to be represented by counsel of their choice.” 5
The first diplomatic exchanges between the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. included addressing the matters of debts and claims concerning the two countries. The Russians agreed to waive claims against the America Expeditionary Force in Siberia, but did not mention the American Expeditionary Force in Murmansk which indicated to Duranty that the Soviets probably intended to press that claim. Duranty quoted the president’s remarks that he read to about 200 newspapermen from his study in the White House. He noted that the “final phrase in the President’s letter is for the preservation of the peace of the world.” 6
Stalin granted Duranty an hour-long interview in late December of 1933. The New York Times printed the interview on its front page, and other papers summarized it. The Soviet Foreign office commented that Stalin did not often give interviews, but he made an exception for W. Duranty. 7 American liberals also applauded Duranty George Seldes, Alvin Adey , and Alexander Woollcott thought Duranty to be unsurpassed in his knowledge and understanding of Russia. Woollcott wrote that the applause at the banquet held in late 1933 at the Waldorf Astoria to celebrate the United States recognition of the USSR seemed to recognize both Russia and Walter Duranty. 8
The Nation, which published a yearly honor roll of citizens and institutions awarded the 1933 honors to The New York Times for printing and Walter Duranty for writing, during the previous decade and half of Soviet rule, “the most enlightening, dispassionate and readable dispatches from a great nation in the making which appeared in any newspaper in the world.” 9 In the 1930s, The Nation, under editor Freida Kerchival, seemed to go along with the Soviet party line, especially when its Moscow correspondent, Louis Fischer echoed Walter Durranty’s views that the Ukrainian famine had not happened. A reporter for the chain of newspapers that William Randolph Hearst owned, Thomas Walker, published a series of stories bringing the Ukrainian famine to public attention. The series featured poignant photographs of starving peasants. Fischer denied the famine’s reality and charged that Hearst had published the stories to discredit the Soviet Union. While speaking to a college audience in Oakland, California, he emphatically stated, “There is no starvation in Russia. 10
But not everyone respected or believed Walter Duranty or Louis Fischer’s version of the famine. On November 18, 1933, the day after the New York Times story by Duranty announced the diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union, a parade of people, many of them Ukrainian, marched up Fifth Avenue to Thirty-fourth Street in New York City to protest what they considered Stalin’s orchestrated murder of millions of Ukrainians. The police estimated that 5,000 people gathered at the meeting place on Eighth Avenue. 11
Fellow journalists like Malcom Muggeridge, Soviet reporter for the Manchester Guardian, who reported from Russia the same time did not honor Duranty or consider him knowledgeable. Muggeridge charged that Duranty lied in and out of print, and thirty years later still alleged that Duranty deliberately suppressed the famine story so that the U.S.S.R.’s chances of diplomatic recognition by the United States would not be compromised. Journalists besides Muggeridge reporting on the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s saw mass starvation in Russia, which Stalin created to crush millions of peasants resisting collectivization. Duranty filed dispatches countering these reports. At first he told The Times that there was no famine anywhere, although “partial crop failures” occurred in some regions.” 12
When Communists stripped the farmers of their harvest, Duranty acknowledged that there was a shortage of food, but said that “there is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be.” Later in a private interview, he admitted that many Ukrainians had died, but not as many as others had reported in the American press.13
According to Duranty, if food shortages did happen, the peasants created them by fleeing from their villages to towns, leaving the harvest in the fields. . Duranty thought exaggerating the situation would be a mistake:
The Russians have tightened their belts before to a far greater extent than is likely to be needed this winter. If there is no international disturbance to complicate matters, remedies doubtless will be found and the Soviet program though menaced and perhaps retarded, will not be seriously affected. 14
Then Malcolm Muggeridge decided to see if he could break Duranty’s blockading of the truth. Muggeridge and his wife Kitty spent the fall and winter of 1932-1933 in Moscow. Without permission, Muggeridge boarded a train and traveled through the Ukraine and North Caucusus. What he observed in what formerly had been the bread basket of the Soviet Union, he never forgot. He wrote a series of articles and smuggled them out of the country in a diplomatic pouch. In his articles he described millions of peasants dying, some in sight of full granaries guarded by the army and the police.
One of his first dispatches about the famine appeared in the Manchester Guardian in March 1933:
The population is starving. “Hunger’ was the word I heard most. Peasants begged a lift on the train from one station to another, sometimes their bodies swollen up – a disagreeable sight – from lack of food. . . The little towns and villages seemed just numb and the people in too desperate a condition even actively to resent what had happened. . . Cattle and horse dead; fields neglected; meager harvest despite moderately good climatic conditions; all the grain that was produced taken by the government now no bread at all, no bread anywhere, nothing much else either; despair and bewilderment. 15
Soviet sympathizers attacked Muggeridge’s articles and Moscow discouraged journalists from visiting the Ukraine. Frederick Birchall, reporter for the New York Times in Berlin, reported on August 24 that a correspondent in another capital had applied for a tourist visa in the Soviet Union. He was denied his visa because the Soviet Union said that journalists were forbidden to travel as tourists. A Moscow-based American correspondent had applied for a visa to return there by way of Odessa . The Soviet Union told him the only way he could obtain a visa was to promise “not to leave the train en route.” 16
His assignment in the Soviet Union convinced Muggeridge that Communism did not hold the answers to the problems of the world. Muggeridge called Duranty’s collective reporting from the Soviet Union an “Essay in untruth”, and marveled satirically that “. . .Mr. Duranty has – to use one of his favorite expressions –‘gotten away with it.’ Readers of The New York Times adore him; the Brain Trust and Dictatorship of the Proletariat have lain down together, and Mr. Duranty has led them; his name is honored amongst the righteous in all parts of the world. . .17
Another Manchester Guardian reporter, Gareth Jones, traveled to the Ukraine and reported about the famine. He got around the ban on journalists by packing a knapsack with as much tinned food as he could carry and went out into the villages of the Kharkiv region on foot. Everywhere he went he saw people dying. He wrote:
In each village I received the same information – namely, that many were dying of famine and that about four-fifths of the cattle and the horses had perished…Nor shall I forget the swollen stomachs of the children in the cottages in which I slept. 18
Quickly, Duranty discounted the stories by implying that British sources had inspired Jones’s story in retaliation for the Soviet arrest of six Englishmen working on construction projects in the USSR. He went on to justify the famine:
But – to put it brutally – you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, and the Bolshevist leaders are just as indifferent to the casualties that may be involved in their drive toward socialization as any general during the world war who ordered a costly attack to show his superiors that he and his division possessed the proper soldierly spirit. In fact, the Bolsheviki are more indifferent, because they are animated by fanatical convictions. 19
United Press Moscow correspondent Eugene Lyons recalled Soviet censor Konstantin Umansky meeting with the American press corps in a reporter’s hotel room. Umansky knew that the reporters all wanted to cover the story of the show trial of the British engineers. Lyons wrote that competitive journalism forced the reporters to vie for Russian favor and he knew that making an issue of the famine at this point would be professional suicide. The reporters bargained for a gentleman’s agreement. Lyons said,
We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that damned Jones as a liar.
The filthy business being disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski. Umansky joined in the celebration, and the party did not break up until the early morning hours. 20
Duranty continued to downplay the effects of the famine. He traveled through the heart of the Ukraine and in a series of articles, he scoffed at the supposed famine. On September 17, he assured his readers that the harvest was splendid and talk of famine was ridiculous. 21 On September 19, Duranty concluded his articles by summing up his impressions of a ten day trip through the North Caucasus and Ukraine. “I repeat the opinion that the decisive engagement in the struggle for rural socialization has been won by the Kremlin. The cost in some places has been heavy, but a generally excellent crop is already mitigating conditions to a marked extent.” 22
Historian Robert Conquest in a study of the Great Famine called The Harvest of Sorrow, and in his testimony before the 1986 Famine Commission says that the events of the famine have not yet fully registered in the Western consciousness. There is a general knowledge that a catastrophe happened in the Soviet countryside, but the details of this catastrophe are unfamiliar to Westerners. Conquest argues that the famine meant herding the surviving Kulaks into collective farms. In 1932, 1933, the Russian government crushed the collectivized peasantry of the Ukraine and adjacent regions by seizing the whole grain crop and starving the villages. Conquest argues that the Stalinist government made a great effort to conceal or deny the facts of the famine and he says that “right from the start, when the truth came out from a variety of sources, the Stalinist assertion of a different story confused the issue and some Western journalists and scholars were duped or suborned into supporting the Stalinist version. “ 23
William Henry Chamberlin was the Christian Science Monitor’s Moscow correspondent for ten years and in 1934 when he was reassigned to the Far East, he wrote an account of the Great Famine in the Ukraine. His story appeared in the May 29, 1934 issue of the Christian Science Monitor. He commented on the scope of the famine by saying that he had visited three widely separated regions of Ukraine and the North Caucasus – Poltava and Byelaya Tserkov and Korpotkin in the North Caucasus – and heard mortality estimate from Soviet and collective farm presidents as ranging around ten percent. He continued:
If one considers that the population of Ukraine is about 35 million and that of the North Caucasus about 10 million and that credible reports of similar famine came from part of the country which I did not visit… it would seem highly probable that between 4 million and 5 million people over and above the normal mortality rate, lost their lives from hunger and related causes. This is in reality behind the innocuous phrases, tolerated by the Soviet censorship, about food stringency, strained food situation, etc..24
Chamberlain speculated about the motivation for the famine. He said that it was not a result of any natural disaster such as a drought or flood because the peasants had told him that the harvest of 1932, while not highly satisfactory, would have sustained them if the state had not requisitioned it. He concluded his story by remarking that the Soviet government along with the other countries of the Kellogg pact, renounced war as an instrument of national policy, but he continued that “there are no humanitarian restrictions in the ruthless class war which in the name of socialism, it has been waging on a considerable part of its own peasant population; and it has employed famine as an instrument of national policy on an unprecedented scale and in an unprecedented way.” 25
According to dispatches in the National Archives, Dr. P.C. Hiebert, head of the Mennonite Central Committee of émigré German Mennonites asked Senator Arthur Capper from Kansas to bring the famine question to the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Foreshadowing future refugee policy, FDR passed the matter on to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. In a tacit admission that there was indeed a famine, Secretary Hull replied, “Unfortunately, there do not appear to be any measures which this Government may appropriately take at this time in order to alleviate the suffering of these unhappy people.” 26
Along with other European nations, Italy had stationed a consulate in the Ukrainian capital. Representatives of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Rome discovered some telling documents, underlined with blue pencil in the style of Benito Mussolini. One of them, dated May 31, 1933, read:
Re: The Famine and The Urkainian Question. According to Consul Gradenigo, there was no doubt that the famine was artificial, designed to “change the ethnic material in the Ukraine, and intended to solve the Ukrainian problem once and for all. 27 In October 1933, American diplomats from the U.S. Embassy to Greece sent the State Department documents that proved that the USSR had confirmed the truth of the famine. In November 1933, America extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union.
A New York Times story in December 1933 revealed Duranty’s real motivation for ridiculing the famine stories. After a government announcement that Soviet grain collections had been completed two and one half months earlier than ever before, Duranty wrote:
This result, fully justifies the optimism expressed to the writer by local authorities during his September
trip through the Ukraine and North Caucasus-optimism that contrasted so strikingly with the famine stories then current in Berlin, Riga, Vienna and other places, where elements hostile to the Soviet Union were making an 11th hour attempt to avert American recognition by picturing the Soviet Union as a land of ruin and despair. 28
But the people back home in the United States and more importantly his boss Carr Van Anda at the New York Times believed Duranty’s assessment of the famine. In 1932, the same year Duranty won the Pulitzer, Governor of New York Franklin Delano Roosevelt campaigned for the presidency of the United States. People who wanted diplomatic recognition for Russia believed it would happen if Roosevelt won the election. Since by all appearances Duranty was the authority on Russia, in late July, FDR publicly invited him to lunch at the governor’s mansion to talk about Soviet gold production. He asked Duranty if he thought that Russia would be able to pay for the trade concessions that went along with official recognition. 29
Duranty’s biographer, S.J. Taylor, affirmed his self- important estimate of his influence in winning diplomatic recognition for the Soviet Union. Taylor tells Duranty’s version of the moment when he stood with the reporters in FDR’s office, just after FDR had announced American recognition of Soviet Russia. Duranty said:
As everybody was walking out, he held me back for a moment and said cordially, “Well, don’t you think it’s a good job?”
I felt proud and pleased, because for seven or eight years I had been trying, had been doing, all I could toward bringing about a Russian-American rapprochement and understanding. I felt I had some small, definite share in it. I supposed it was the greatest satisfaction I have ever had.” 30
After this diplomatic coup, Duranty occupied himself with reporting the show trials that Stalin staged in the purges of the late 1930s and insisting that everyone found guilty in the trials had to be guilty because Stalin would not punish innocent people. Eventually, the New York Times did not print his stories as readily as it once did, because word of Duranty’s lack of credibility finally had reached the editorial rooms. The Nazi Soviet pact estranged Russia from the Allies and neutralized any remaining claims to diplomatic fame that Duranty might have possessed.
Just nine years later, two confidential memos that FDR kept locked in his secret safe file revealed how far the United States had gone to insure that its ally the Soviet Union, which it had just diplomatically recognized just eight years ago in 1933 could withstand the German onslaught in 1941. The first document is a memo from Harry Hopkins, FDR’s personal representative, whom he sent to a Moscow conference with Stalin and Litvinov. Hopkins summarized Stalin’s current analysis of the war between Germany and Russia.
Stalin declared that he could mobilize 350 divisions and would have that many divisions under arms by the time the spring campaign began in May 1942. He said that he was anxious to have as many of his divisions as possible in contact with the enemy, because “then the troops learn that Germans can be killed and are not super men.” According to Stalin, killing Germans gave his men confidence and he said that his soldiers did not consider the battle lost merely because the German broke through Russian lines. The Russian mechanized forces attacked at another point and often moved many miles behind the German line. The Russian soldiers Stalin said, fight behind the Germans, are adept at the use of cover, and fight their way out in the night. He said, “Even the German tanks run out of petrol.” 31
A memo dated October 13, 1941, a mere four months after the German invasion of Russia, is a direct communication from FDR to Stalin. In this memo sent via Navy Radio, FDR informed Stalin that the United States was shipping tanks, bombers, 5,500 trucks and large amounts of barbed wire during October. “All other military supplies we promised for October are being swiftly assembled to be placed on ships.” 32
Roosevelt told Stalin that three ships had left the United States bound for Russian ports the day before and that every effort was being made to rush other supplies. In another memo dated October 30, 1941 Roosevelt advised Stalin that he had ordered all financial obstacles to be removed from an immediate loan in the value of one billion dollars to be made under the Lend Lease Act. He wrote, “I propose, subject to the approval of the government of the U.S.S.R., that no interest be charged on the indebtedness as a result of these shipments and that the payments on such begin only five years from the conclusion of the war and completed over a period of ten years thereafter…” Roosevelt ended this reassuring letter by encouraging Stalin to get in touch with him directly if the occasion required it. 33
On November 4, 1941 Stalin replied to the president. He thanked Roosevelt for granting the Soviet Union a loan in the amount of one billion dollars at no interest charges and to pay for armaments and raw materials. He said, “I agree completely, on behalf of the Government of the Soviet Union, with the conditions which you outline for this loan to the Soviet Union, namely that payment on the loan shall begin five years after the end of the war and shall be completed during the following ten year period.. .” 34
A week after Pearl Harbor, the House of Representatives passed a national defense appropriation bill to the tune of $8,243,839,031, and according to Time Magazine, about $78,000 of this sum was earmarked for Russian lend lease. Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Reverend Charles E. Coughlin predicted in his magazine Social Justice, that “Karl Marx will win this war.” 35
About two weeks after Pearl Harbor, publishers Simon and Schuster brought out a book called Mission to Moscow by former ambassador to Russia, Joseph Davies. The book was favorable to Stalin and echoed Walter Duranty’s view that the show trials revealed that the defendants were guilty and Stalin’s views were correct. It completely endorsed Soviet foreign policy.
History’s assessment of Walter Duranty has not been kind. His biographer S.J. Taylor and historian Robert Conquest have written convincingly that he deliberately lied about the Russian famine. During the Stalin years in Russia before World War II, the American press was ambiguous at best and biased at worse in reporting the excesses of Stalinist Russia.
Some historians have not been kind to the Roosevelt Stalin relationship either. In a hard-hitting revisionist history of Roosevelt's foreign policy, A Not So Grand Alliance, 1943-1945, historian Amos Perlmutter explores Roosevelt’s alliance with Stalin. He was the first Western scholar that the Russian government gave access to key foreign ministry documents recently declassified in the former Soviet Union. Perlmutter provides a portrait of a popular leader whose failure to comprehend Stalin’s long range goals had devastating results for the postwar world.
The United States probably would have granted diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union whether or not Walter Duranty was involved, but Duranty was in the right country at the right time and helped move the process along. Many of Duranty’s colleagues believed him to be naïve and one-sided in his assessments of the Soviet Union and reading his dispatches about the Ukrainian famine seems to bear out their opinions. But it can be said in Duranty’s defense that many thousands of his fellow Englishmen and Americans were just as naïve, including FDR himself in many respects. The American press proved that it was indeed, free, in the scope and diversity of its reporting about the Stalinist era.
END NOTES
1 Andrew Stuttaford in National Review Online. http://www.nationalreview.com/contributors/stuttaford051501.snitm
2 Walter Duranty, Duranty Reports Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1934), 362.
3 Andrew Stuttaford in National Review Online.
http://www.nationalreview.com/contributors/stuttaford051501.snitm
4 S. J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man in Moscow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 182.
5 The New York Times, November 17, 1933.
6 The New York Times, November 17, 1933.
7 The New York Times, December 28, 1933.
8 Alexander Woollcott, Duranty Reports Russia (New York: 1934) Preface.
9 George Seldes, Freedom of the Press (New York, 1936) ,341.
10 Louis Fischer, “Hearst’s Russian “Famine,” The Nation March 14, 1935 p. 296.
11 The Great Famine-Genocide in Soviet Ukraine, 1932-1933. Website. http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/1986/448021.smith
12 Harrison Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor (New York: Times Books, 1980) 464.
13 The New York Times, November 25, 1932.
14 Ibid.
15 The Manchester Guardian, March 27, 1933.
16 The New York Times, August 25, 1933.
17 Malcolm Muggeridge, “Any Essay in Untruth,” The English Review, Vol. LIX (October 1934), pp. 500-502.
18 The Manchester Guardian, May 8, 1933.
19 The New York Times, March 31, 1933. Actually, the omelet remark did not originate with Walter Duranty. French revolutionary Maximilian Robespierre declared in 1790, “One cannot expect to make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
20Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (New York, 1937),575.
21The New York Times, September 18, 1933.
22 The New York Times, September 20, 1933.
23 Conquests statement before the famine commission. Website. http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/1986/448021.smith
24 The Christian Science Monitor, May 29, 1934.
25 The Christian Science Monitor, May 29, 1934.
26 Ukrainian Daily Newspaper, The Day, May 31, 1933.
27 Ibid.
28 The New York Times, December 17, 1933.
29 Walter Duranty, I Write As I Please (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935)
30William Seabrook and Walter Duranty, “You’re Telling Me!” The American Magazine, July 1936, p. 54.
31 Memo from Hopkins, August 20, 1941. Roosevelt Library Digital Archives. Website.
http://www.honorary.manst.edu/psi/box5/ao1wo2.httm
32 Memo, FDR Stalin 10/13/41. Franklin Roosevelt Digital Archives, Roosevelt Library
Website/ http://www.honorary.manst.edu/psi/box5/ao1wo2.httm
33 Ibid.
34 Stalin to Roosevelt, November 4, 1941. Roosevelt Library Digital Archives. Website.
http://www.honorary.manst.edu/psi/obx5/ao1wo2.httm
35 Social Justice, December 22, 1941. P. 4
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Manuscript Collections
Roosevelt Library Digital Archives.
Books
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: Viking press, 1934.
Duranty, Walter. I Write As I Please. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935.
Getty, Arch and Manning, Robert T., ed. Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Lyons, Eugene. Assignment in Utopia. New York, 1937.
Salisbury, Harrison. Without Fear or Favor. New York: Times Books, 1980.
Seldes, George. Freedom of the Press. New York, 1936.
Taylor, S.J. Stalin’s Apologist, Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man In Moscow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Thurston, Robert W. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996.
Journals
The English Review
Magazines
The American Magazine
National Review Online
The Nation
Social Justice
Newspapers
The New York Times The Manchester Guardian
The Christian Science Monitor
Ukrainian Daily Newspaper
Websites
National Review Online
http://www.nationalreview.com/contributors/stuttaford051501.snitm
Library of Congress Soviet Archives Exhibit
http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive1986/44802.smith
Ukrainian Archives
http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/1986/448021.smith
Roosevelt Library Digital Archives
http://www.honorary.manst.edu/psi/box5/ao1wo2.httm