DURANTY: NEW THE YORK TIMES 5 MAN IN MOSCOW STALIN S APOLOGIST Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man Moscow in Short, unattractive, hobbling about Stalin’s Moscow on a wooden leg, Walter Duranty was an unlikely candidate for the world’s most famous foreign correspon- dent. Yet for almost twenty years his articles filled the front page of The New York Times with gripping coverage of the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. A witty, engaging, impish haracter with a c flamboyant life-style, he was a Pulitzer Prize winner, the individual most credited with helping to win U.S. recognition for the Soviet regime, and the reporter who had predicted the success of the Bolshevik state when all others claimed it was doomed. But, as S.J. laylor reveals in this provocative biography, Walter Duranty played a key role in perpetrating some of the greatest lies history has ever known. Stalin’s Apologist deftly unfolds the story of this accomplished but sordid and tragic life. Drawing on sources ranging from newspapers to private letters and journals to interviews with such figures as William Shirer and W. Averell Harriman, Taylor’s vivid narrative unveils a figure driven by ambition, whose early success — reporting on Bolshevik Russia he was foremost in predicting Stalin’s rise to — power established his international reputation, fed his overconfident con- tempt for his colleagues, and indeed led him to identify with the Soviet dictator. Thus during the great Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s, which Stalin engineered to crush millions of peasants who resisted his policies, Duranty dismissed other correspondents’ reports of mass starvation and, though secretly aware of the full scale of the horror, effectively reinforced the official cover-up of one of history’s man-made greatest disasters. letter, he BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 with funding from China-America Digital Academic Library (CADAL) https://archive.org/details/stalinsapologistOOtayl Stalin’s Apologist Stalin’s Apologist Walter Duranty Man Moscow New The York Times’s in TAYLOR S. J. New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1990 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan © Copyright 1990 by S. J. Taylor Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by anv means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Taylor, S. J. (Sally J.) Stalin's apologist : Walter Duranty, the New York Times's Man in Moscow / S. J. Taylor, cm. p. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-19-505700-7 Duranty, Walter, 1884-1957. 2. Foreig—n corresponden—ts—United States—Biography. 3. Foreign correspondents Soviet Union Biography. 4. Soviet Union—Politics and government—1917-1936. I. Title PN4874.D87T39 1989 070.4'332'092—dc20 [B] 89-16108 CIP 98765432 1 Printed in the United States ofAmerica on acid-free paper For Herbert L. Fink, graphic artist