As
freedom-lovers throughout the world celebrate the twentieth anniversary
of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the freedom-lovers at the New York Times, if there are any,
have to be reflecting on that paper's own role in the Wall's
construction.
As it happens,
no English-speaker was more responsible for the savage sprawl of the
Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain that reinforced it than the Times'
own ace reporter, Walter Duranty.
In November
1933, the one-legged reporter had come to Washington, D.C. from Moscow
to witness President Roosevelt officially recognize the Soviet Union.
Duranty knew, and everyone else knew, that were it not for his
reporting, the President would never have pushed for recognition.
After the
event, FDR sought out this now-famed correspondent and asked him,
"Don't you think it's a good job?" Duranty did indeed.
A little more
than a year later, Simon & Schuster published Duranty's take on
the Soviet experiment. The title of the book was scarily appropriate: I Write As I Please. In this
classic of willful blindness, the presumably objective journalist sheds
his usual cynicism only to show his affection for Comrade Stalin.
As Duranty
related, he "felt as pleased as punch" when Stalin announced the
Five-Year Plan in the fall of 1928. Stalin, after all, was the world's
"greatest living statesman," the one man capable of pulling off this
extraordinary task.
As part of the
plan, Stalin was prepared "to socialize, virtually overnight, a hundred
million of the stubbornest and most ignorant peasants in the world."
Stalin specifically named the enemy in December 1929 when he demanded
"the eradication of all kulak tendencies and the elimination of all
kulaks as a class."
By definition,
a kulak was a wealthy land-owning peasant -- "wealthy" meaning anyone
who produced more than his family consumed. In time, the Soviets
defined the term down to just about anyone who resisted
collectivization, these being the hundred million stubborn and ignorant
peasants of Duranty's glib retelling.
Early in that
same year, the kulaks and other peasants resisted as the Soviets
attempted to appropriate their property and force them into
collectives. In March 1930 alone, there were more than 6,500
Soviet-style tea parties centering on the Ukraine and expanding
outward.
Stalin was not
pleased. During a six-week period including March 1930, the
Ukrainian GPU, the justice arm of the Soviet state, sentenced more than
20,000 people to death through its courts for resisting
collectivization.
Many others
were executed without judicial niceties. Somehow, this all seems to
have escaped the attention of Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty. Much
worse would escape him in the years ahead.
In 1930, the
GPU got serious about deporting the kulaks and other "socially
dangerous elements" like priests, nuns, shopkeepers, and rural
artisans. By the end of 1930, 700,000 people had been shipped to the
nether regions of the Soviet Union. By the end of 1931, that number had
swollen to 1.8 million.
By stripping
the countryside of its more productive citizens and reducing the rest
to penury, Stalin set the stage for the horror-show that was to follow.
He and his cohorts began by shaking down those left on the land for a
bigger slice of the action.
In 1932, for
instance, the government take was to be 32 percent higher than the year
before. By that year, the peasantry was faced with a grim choice:
resist the collection or starve to death. They resisted.
Stalin sent in
his shock troops. They came to enforce the infamous 1932 "ear law," so
dubbed because an individual could and would be arrested for
withholding any "socialist property," right down to an ear of corn. By
the end of 1933, authorities had arrested more than 125,000 people
under the law and sentenced more than 5,000 to death. In areas of
widespread resistance, the authorities would deport whole towns.
To defeat an
enemy this stubborn, there could be only one recourse for Stalin. Notes
the authoritative Black Book of
Communism, "He [the enemy] would have to be starved out."
By late summer
1932, when even hard-liners began to plead for some relief for these
peasants, Moscow turned them down cold. This hardheartedness gave birth
to the adage, "Moscow does not believe in tears."
Harassed and
starving, with no hope for the future, millions fled these rich
agricultural lands for the cities. At this point, Stalin got serious.
In December 1932, in order to "liquidate social parasitism," he
mandated the equivalent of passports for all internal migration.
In January
1933, Molotov and Stalin instructed local authorities and the GPU to
stop the peasants from leaving their farms "by all means necessary."
These "means" included mass execution. In February 1933 alone, the
secret police reported that it had stopped more than 219,000 desperate
peasants in their tracks.
In April 1933,
after touring this ravaged countryside, the writer Mikhail Sholokhov
wrote a plaintive letter to Stalin. He detailed the tortures used by
local Communist officials to meet their quotas.
In the "cold"
method, whole brigades of collective workers were forced to stand naked
in the frigid night until they revealed hidden grain stashes. In the
"hot" method, officials would set fire to the bottom of women's skirts
and refuse to douse them until they too gave up their family's food.
In a
combination of hot and cold, officials would splay peasants on a hot
stove and then make them nurse their burns naked in the cold. "These
are not abuses of the system," wrote Sholokhov. "This is the system for collecting
grain."
The recounting
of these "minor inconveniences" did not move Stalin. "These people
deliberately tried to undermine the Soviet state," he wrote back. "It
is a fight to the death, Comrade Sholokhov."
Duranty would
describe this period as "a heroic chapter in the life of Humanity." The
capital "H" is Duranty's touch. If large-"H" humanity advanced,
small-"h" humanity fell by the wayside, and Duranty knew it.
"According to
Mr. Duranty the population of the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga
had decreased in the last year by three million, and the population of
the Ukraine by four to five million," wrote the British chargé d'affaires in Moscow just
a month before Duranty was to head back to America to witness the
Soviet Union's official recognition. The British official knew this was
no accident. "The Ukraine had been bled white," he added.
Two questions
need to be asked here. One is how a New
York Times reporter could countenance such evil. The second
is how he could get away with concealing it. The answers are
becoming depressingly familiar.
The year 1913
found the ambitious, if unfocused, Duranty in Paris. He was making
useful connections in the city's Anglophone community by serving as
something of a deacon in an ongoing series of black masses known as
"the Paris workings." The mantra of this unholy affair, "sanguis et semen" (blood and
semen), nicely captures its over-the-edge, homoerotic flavor.
In his later
life, Duranty would not say much about these "workings," or about his
religious inclinations, "only that he no longer believed in anything."
That same year, 1913, Duranty finessed these connections to secure a
job with the New York Times
in Paris.
By the time of
the terror-famine, Duranty's callousness rivaled Stalin's own.
"Russians may be hungry and short of clothes and comfort," he wrote in
the New York Times in
1932. "But you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
To the Times reader, conditions in the
Soviet Union must have seemed no worse than those of Hoover's USA, the
difference being that Stalin was offering hope and change. "The
'famine' is mostly bunk," Duranty wrote to a friend in June 1933. He
used his and the Times'
authority to feed the story to an establishment that had developed a
taste for progressive hogwash.
The Pulitzer
Committee awarded him its top prize for news correspondence in 1932.
The Committee cited the "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound
judgment, and exceptional clarity" of his reporting on the Five-Year
Plan in the Soviet Union.
The Nation, the quintessential
progressive journal, cited the Times
and Duranty on its annual "honor roll," describing his as "the most
enlightening, dispassionate, and readable dispatches from a great
nation in the making which appeared in any newspaper in the world."
To the editors
of the Nation and
especially the New York Times:
on this, the twentieth anniversary of the Wall's fall, how about an
apology?