Walter Duranty's Pulitzer and the Famine the New York Times Did Not See

Some stories teach by being awful, and this is one of them. In the winter and spring of 1933, millions of people in Ukraine were dying of hunger in a country that was exporting grain, and the most prestigious American newspaper told its readers, in effect, that the reports were exaggerated. The reporter who wrote that was not a fool and not obscure. He had a Pulitzer Prize. The man who told the truth was a young Welshman with no Pulitzer, and he was called a liar for it.

I want to take this case slowly, because it is easy to turn it into a cartoon in which a villain deceives a nation. The truth is more useful and more uncomfortable. It is the story of how a correspondent can be captured without ever being bribed, simply by wanting to keep his seat at the table. The argument below proceeds in five steps. Define the terms, state the other side's best case, show the record, press the conclusion, and then measure it against what the Founders understood about information and power.

Terms

The Holodomor. The Ukrainian word for the man-made famine of 1932 and 1933 in the Soviet Ukrainian republic, a name that joins the words for hunger and extermination. It followed Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture and the seizure of grain from peasants to meet state quotas. Estimates of the dead run to several million. The cause was policy, not weather.

Access journalism. Reporting that depends on the cooperation of the people the reporter covers: visas, interviews, permits to travel, a seat at the briefing. Access is valuable. It is also a leash, because the power that grants it can withdraw it.

Capture. The condition in which a reporter's judgment begins to serve the interests of the source who controls access. It need not involve money or even conscious dishonesty. It needs only a reporter who prefers keeping the relationship to risking it.

The man and his award

Walter Duranty was a British-born journalist who led the New York Times bureau in Moscow from the early 1920s into the 1930s. He had an enviable position: he knew the language, the officials, and the city, and he secured an exclusive interview with Stalin himself, a coup for any correspondent. In 1932 he received the Pulitzer Prize for correspondence, for a series of articles from the Soviet Union in 1931. The prize was awarded for his 1931 series, and the Times was proud of it.

Pause on the year. In 1931 the Soviet Union was a closed society, and the Five-Year Plan was being celebrated by sympathetic visitors from the West. Duranty's reports were generally favourable to the plan and to the idea that the regime was building something solid. That is a point of view, and a newspaper is allowed to employ people with views. The question is what the same man did when the plan's human cost became impossible to hide.

What he wrote when people were dying

In 1933 Duranty was the Times's man in Moscow when reports of famine in Ukraine and the North Caucasus were reaching the foreign press. Several reporters who travelled or who had sources in the region wrote that people were starving. The Soviet government, for its part, denied it and restricted the movement of foreign correspondents into the affected regions. In that setting, Duranty published pieces that played down the scale and, in at least one, used a distinction I would call a masterpiece of the evasive art. He allowed that there were food shortages and widespread deaths from diseases connected to malnutrition, and he denied that there was famine in the full sense. The Times ran a headline that told readers, in essence, that Russians were hungry but not starving.

There is a line attributed to Duranty that captures the logic, to the effect that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. As an excuse for a policy of mass death, it may be the most chilling kitchen metaphor in the history of journalism. Whether he meant it as a defence of the regime or as a hard-boiled aside, the fact is that a reader of the Times in 1933 was left with a picture of hardship rather than catastrophe.

Here is the part that makes the story worse and not merely sad. There are accounts, drawn from British diplomatic records, that Duranty told a British official in private a far darker estimate of the dead than anything he printed. I give that as a record to check, not as something I can quote, and I urge you to look it up and form your own view. If it is accurate, then the problem was not that Duranty did not know. The problem was that what he knew and what he wrote were two different documents.

The Welshman

Now look at the other man. Gareth Jones was a young Welsh journalist, a graduate of Cambridge who had worked as a foreign affairs adviser to David Lloyd George and who spoke Russian. In the last days of March 1933 he made a walking trip through Ukrainian villages, without an official escort, and saw empty villages and starving people. When he left the Soviet Union he made a statement to the press in Berlin on March 29, and his account was printed in British and American newspapers. He wrote that he had seen the famine. He described what peasants had told him, and what he had seen: bread running out, animals killed, people dying.

The reaction in Moscow was not an investigation. It was a rebuttal. The Soviet foreign office attacked his credibility, and the foreign press corps in Moscow, who had reasons of their own for staying on good terms with the authorities, joined in a collective dismissal. In the Times on March 31, 1933, under the headline "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving," Duranty took aim at the famine reports, speaking of a "big scare story," and that is where the contrast hurts. A reporter with a prize and a bureau, writing from the capital, answered a reporter on foot in the countryside, and the paper treated the better-credentialled man as the more reliable.

A few other correspondents did tell the truth in print. Malcolm Muggeridge sent back unsigned dispatches to the Manchester Guardian in March 1933 on the famine. Eugene Lyons later wrote a memoir that criticised the conduct of the Moscow correspondents, Duranty's among them. I mention them to be fair: the Moscow press corps was not a monolith. Jones himself died in 1935, killed in Japanese-occupied Inner Mongolia, a day short of his thirtieth birthday, in circumstances that are still debated.

The steelman

You should hear the defence at its strongest. It goes like this.

A correspondent in Moscow in 1933 was in an impossible position. He could not leave the capital without permission. He could not publish what he could not verify, and he could not verify famine in places where the state barred him from going. He had to protect his sources, his visa and his bureau. He wrote that there was hunger and disease, which was true. The word "famine" had a technical meaning, and he used it strictly. In private he told diplomats what he really thought. And no one could have foreseen how history would judge the regime.

That is a serious argument, and part of it is right. A reporter under censorship does face genuine constraints, and a historian should not judge him by what we now know. If Duranty had simply written that he could not confirm reports, he would have been defensible.

But the defence fails at three points, and I will number them.

1. He did not say that he could not confirm. He said that the reports were exaggerated. Those are different sentences. One tells the reader that the picture is unclear; the other tells the reader that the alarm is false. A reporter who is truly blocked from the facts owes the reader the first sentence. He gave the second.
2. He attacked the man who went and looked. The distinction between an honest limit and a convenient fog is revealed by what you do when someone else gets through the fog. A reporter who is frustrated by the barrier welcomes the person who gets around it. Duranty dismissed him.
3. The private knowledge makes it worse, not better. If he told diplomats one thing and readers another, he was not caught in the machinery of censorship. He was choosing which audience got the truth, and he gave it to the audience that could not act on it in public.

What the Times itself later concluded

To its credit, the Times has examined the matter. In 2003, when Ukrainian organisations and others pressed for the prize to be revoked, the paper asked a historian, Mark von Hagen of Columbia University, to review Duranty's 1931 reporting. His assessment was harsh: he cited a lack of balance and an uncritical acceptance of the Soviet regime's own justifications, and he later said that for the Times's honor the prize should be taken away.

Then came the surprise. In November 2003 the Pulitzer Prize Board considered the matter and decided not to revoke the prize. Its reasoning was that it had found no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception in the specific 1931 entries that won. In other words, the Board held that the prize had been awarded for a body of 1931 reporting, not the 1933 famine articles, and that the evidence did not meet its standard for taking back an award. You can understand the legal formalism. You can also notice what it means: the prize stands, the newspaper that employed him has acknowledged the defects in the work, and the board has never changed its decision.

I do not think everyone's conscience is satisfied by that. A fair summary of the record is this: the Times has acknowledged the failure, the Pulitzer Board has declined to revoke, and historians generally agree that the famine was real, deliberate in its effects, and concealed with the help of a press corps that was told what to say and mostly said it.

The argument

Here is the thesis in numbered premises.

1. A regime that controls information controls access, and a regime that controls access can shape the reporting without ever censoring a word.
2. A correspondent who depends on access has an incentive to protect it, and the incentive works silently, through what he asks and how he hedges.
3. In 1933 the regime had a strong motive to hide a famine its policies created, and it used visas, travel permits and official denials to do so.
4. A reporter who minimises the catastrophe in that setting, and who attacks the witness who got through, is functioning as part of the concealment whether he intends to or not.
5. Therefore the reader of a report from a closed society should ask first what the reporter was permitted to see, and should discount a reporter whose conclusions are the ones the government wanted.

That last premise is the practical one, and it applies far beyond Moscow. It applies wherever a source can reward or punish the reporter, including the press offices of democratic governments, the briefing rooms of corporations, and the leaks that flow to reporters who have proved friendly. We discuss that dynamic in Anonymous Sources, Who Gets Them and What a Reader Should Demand.

The values layer

I have been stating facts, and I should be clear about the value underneath them. The moral claim is that a human life is not a statistic for a five-year plan, that the dignity of the peasant in the Ukrainian village is not less than that of the minister in the Kremlin, and that a society that cannot be told the truth about its own dead has been robbed of something fundamental. The Jewish and Christian tradition that shaped the West insists on witness: the commandment against bearing false witness is not a footnote to the moral law. A reporter is a witness. A witness who shades his testimony to protect his seat has committed the specific sin that the tradition names.

The economic lesson is part of the case too. Central planning does not merely allocate resources badly. It needs lies, because the plan cannot admit its own failure without admitting that the planners are not gods. The Soviet famine was a policy failure that the state had to deny. Every system that centralises control of production ends by centralising control of information, because the plan and the truth cannot sit side by side for long. That is why the topic belongs in any honest account of what socialism costs. For the constitutional version of the lesson, see Bills of Rights Alone Never Saved a Republic, Ask the Soviet Constitution.

The Founders and the information problem

James Madison wrote to W. T. Barry in 1822 that "A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both." The words fit the Duranty case with horrible exactness. A people who cannot learn what their rulers are doing cannot govern themselves, and a free people who rely on a press that has been captured are, in effect, in the same position. The First Amendment protects a press that is free of the government; it does not guarantee a press that is free of capture by the people it covers. That second freedom has to be earned by the reporters and demanded by readers.

This is also why the claim that the American press has always served the truth fails as history. A free press is an opportunity, not a guarantee. The freedom to publish includes the freedom to publish the regime's version, and the Pulitzer Board's choice not to revoke a prize shows that institutions protect their own, as institutions always do. See Freedom of the Press Meant No Prior Restraint, and Then It Meant More for how the freedom was understood at the start, and Fabricated From the Byline Up, Four Scandals That Shamed Elite Newsrooms for a related failure of editors.

What this means for a modern reader

You do not have to live in a famine to apply the lesson. Ask of any report from a place where the government controls what is seen: was the reporter free to go where he wished? Did the officials choose his interviews? Did he name the limits on what he could verify? Is his conclusion suspiciously close to the official line? If a story from a closed state reads like a brochure, the reporter was either captured or censored, and in either case the story is a statement of the regime's position, not a window.

Notice also that the lesson cuts in a direction readers on the right sometimes forget. We are quick to see capture in outlets we dislike. We should be as quick to see it in outlets we like, including those on our own side whose access depends on a friendly reception. The standard is the same.

The case in brief

1. Walter Duranty, a Pulitzer winner and the Times's man in Moscow, downplayed the 1932 to 1933 Ukrainian famine and, on March 31, 1933, rebutted Gareth Jones, who had walked through the villages and reported the truth.
2. The Times later commissioned an outside historian's review that found the work unbalanced and uncritical, yet the Pulitzer Board declined in 2003 to revoke the prize.
3. A reporter under real censorship owes readers the sentence "I cannot confirm this"; Duranty offered the sentence "this is exaggerated," and attacked the one who got through.
4. Access without independence is capture, and central planning needs captured reporters because it cannot survive the truth about its own results.
5. The Founders' answer, in Madison's words, is that self-government depends on information; the citizen's job is to ask what the reporter was permitted to see.

What you can do: when you read a report from a country that restricts journalists, look for the sentence that says what the reporter was not allowed to see, and weigh the report accordingly.