Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Extra rewards were available to those who played the game particularly well, as the case of Walter Duranty famously illustrates. Duranty was the correspondent for The New York Times in Moscow between 1922 and 1936, a role that, for a time, made him relatively rich and famous. Duranty, British by birth, had no ties to the ideological left, adopting rather the position of a hard-headed and sceptical “realist” trying to listen to both sides of a story. “It may be objected that the vivisection of living animals is a sad and dreadful thing, and it is true that the lot of kulaks and others who have opposed the Soviet experiment is not a happy one,” he wrote in 1935. But “in both cases, the suffering inflicted is done with a noble purpose.”62 This position made Duranty enormously useful to the regime, which went out of its way to ensure that he lived well in Moscow. He had a large flat, kept a car and a mistress, had the best access of any correspondent, and twice received coveted interviews with Stalin. But the attention he won from his reporting seems to have been the primary motivation for Duranty’s flattering coverage of the USSR. Whereas Clyman’s writing struck few chords, Duranty’s missives from Moscow made him one of the most influential journalists of his time. Many of the men who would become part of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Brains Trust” were looking for new economic ideas and had a deep interest in the Soviet experiment; several had visited Moscow in 1927, where they were...