The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

Walter Duranty was given a two-week head start, presumably as a form of payback for being the most vociferous champion of the nonexistence of the starving millions. In a New York Times report titled “Abundance Found In North Caucasus,” Duranty wrote, “The use of the word ‘Famine’ in connection with the North Caucasus is a sheer absurdity. There a bumper crop is being harvested as fast as tractors, horses, oxen, men, women, and children can work . . . There are plump babies in the nurseries or gardens of the collectives . . . Village markets are flowing with eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk and butter at prices lower than in Moscow.” 10 But Walter Duranty’s private remarks were very different from his published story. To British diplomats in Moscow he admitted “that Ukraine has been bled white . . . It was quite possible that as many as ten million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year.”