What's a few million dead Russians?

Protesters will meet outside the New York Times building tomorrow to demand that Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., surrender Walter Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer Prize. Duranty won the prize for articles about the Soviet Union, articles that covered up the forced collectivization of the Ukraine, which, historians estimate, killed between six and 10 million people.

Clever in crafting words, a bon vivant, ever-engaging as a dinner companion, he was much in demand in certain circles. He satiated other needs as a novice necromancer, pervert and drunkard. His name was Walter Duranty, The New York Times's man in Moscow in the early 1930s. For supposedly objective reporting about conditions there, Duranty was distinguished with the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence. What he was really was Stalin's apologist, a libertine prepared to prostitute accuracy for access, ever-ready to write whatever was necessary to secure him in his various cravings.

Much of this was known at the time, hence the deprecating references to him as "Walter Obscuranty." More tellingly, Malcolm Muggeridge, a contemporary, said that Duranty was "the greatest liar of any journalist I have ever met." Despite being one of the few eyewitnesses to the politically engineered Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine, Duranty nevertheless spun stories for The New York Times dismissing all accounts of that horror as nothing more than bunk or malicious anti-Soviet propaganda.

He knew otherwise. On 26 September 1933, at the British Embassy in Moscow, Duranty privately confided to William Strang that as many as 10 million people had died directly or indirectly of famine conditions in the USSR during the past year. Meanwhile, publicly, Duranty orchestrated a vicious ostracizing of those journalists who risked much by reporting on the brutalities of forced collectivization and the ensuing demographic catastrophe, Muggeridge among them. Even as the fertile Ukraine, once the breadbasket of Europe, became a modern-day Golgotha, a place of skulls, Duranty plowed the truth under. Occasionally pressed on the human costs of the Soviet experiment he did, however, evolve a dismissive dodge, canting "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs." Not his eggs, of course.

In November 2003, the Pulitzer Prize Board refused to revoke Duranty's prize, saying that the prize was given on the basis of 13 stories from 1931 and did not consider the author's body or work or his character.

The Times was only too happy to accept the board's decision. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. had earlier stated that giving back the prize was tantamount to "airbrushing" history.

More here and here.