Duranty's blood stained Pulitzer prize

By Aussiegirl

My own parents experienced this famine as children. My mother was about 13 years old, and my father was a student of 19. They were lucky to survive. I will have more to say about their memories tomorrow.

FrontPage magazine.com :: A Blood-Stained Pulitzer by Jamie Glazov

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Volodymyr Kurylo, the President of the United Ukrainian American Organizations of Greater New York. The organization is about 100 years old and is also the local branch of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America. The group will be gathering in front of The NY Times building, at 229 West 43rd Street between 7th and 8th in Manhattan, tomorrow, on Friday, November 18th at 12 noon , to demand that Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., surrender Walter Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer Prize.

Kurylo: Thank you. I welcome the opportunity to be interviewed about an important issue related to the Ukrainian Famine Genocide of 1932-1933.

FP: Tell us exactly what this protest is about.

Kurylo: We have organized this protest to demand that Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., publisher of The New York Times, finally "do the right thing" and surrender Walter Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer. Its the moral thing to do. After all, the lies that Duranty dispatched and were printed in The New York Times denied that Stalin was intentionally, with impunity, starving between 7 to 10 million innocent Ukrainian men, women & children to death. Didn't Duranty & the Times set the standard for "holocaust denial"? I am honored to announce that our organization has been joined by the Gareth Jones Society for Truth in Journalism. Mr. Nigel Colley, Gareth Jones great nephew will speak at our rally.

FP: Tell us about the Ukraine famine.

Kurylo: We should call it the Ukrainian Famine Genocide of 1932-1933. Ukrainians have known it as the "Holodomor". Stalin needed and wanted to collectivize agriculture in the fledgling Soviet Union. The USSR was a third world country and Stalin needed to industrialize it. He did so rapidly & brutally. Ukraine has been known as "the breadbasket of Europe" because of its rich agricultural region and the crops it produced, primarily grains. Wheat was a valuable commodity to be traded for hard currency. Stalin instituted a policy of forced collectivization. It was easier to seize more produce from the independently-minded peasants if they were forced into large state-controlled farms. Towards the end of 1931, about 70 percent of Ukrainian peasants had been coerced into joining the collectives. During this period grain seizures began to wipe out reserves which had been accumulated from previous harvests. Even though famine was breaking out, nothing was going to stop Stalin.

The peasant-producers had to fulfill their obligations to the State before they could receive their allotment. Quotas were unreasonable and bands of communist zealots, military units and NKVD secret police were sent in to enforce the Stalins decrees. Even seed grain was declared state property and withholding even a few grains was considered a crime against the state punishable death by death.

Early in 1932, the Soviets continued to increase the grain procurement quotas for Ukraine. Stalin, Kaganovich, Molotove et.al. were well aware that extraordinarily high grain quotas would result in grain shortages. They didn't care that Ukrainian peasants would not be able to feed their families. Villages that were emptied by the genocidal famine would be re-populated with ethnic Russians thereby helping to solve the nationalities issue Stalin was facing. Stalin also implemented an internal passport system to restrict peasants from traveling in search of food. In fact, the peasants were the last group to be issued passports decades after anyone else.

The toll was staggering: estimates range from 7 to 10 million dead. At its peak, the genocide was claiming 25,000 peasants a day. We haven't touched upon executions, internal exiling, forced-slave labor etc.

FP: I would recommend Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow on this tragic topic. Let’s move on to Duranty. He covered up this terror famine, yet he knew all about it. Why do you think?

Kurylo: Yes, Duranty covered up the Ukrainian Famine Genocide of 1932-1933 by denying its very existence. What kind of human being could pen "there is no famine" and "any report of a famine is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda" when the stench of millions of corpses filled the air?

In her memoir "An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia", Zara Witkin reported a revealing incident. Ralph Barnes, the New York Herald Tribune reporter, asked how Duranty was going to report the story about the Stalin-made famine to which Duranty responded: "What are a few million dead Russians (Ukrainians) in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated."

The Soviets had instituted a policy of strict censorship. Umansky controlled the correspondents stationed in Moscow. To stray from the party line was to commit professional suicide. There were courageous and honest journalists like Malcom Muggeridge and Gareth Jones who wrote the truth at the expense of their careers in the Moscow press corps. Duranty lacked the honesty & integrity. Duranty covered the Soviet Union for The New York Times from 1922 to 1941. That's quite a feat.

FP: Yes indeed. I would add that Duranty intentionally covered up this whole massacre because he supported it. Just like the despotism he venerated, he wanted millions to die. Like every believer in earthly utopia, he yearned for the destruction of this world, since in his political vision, as in the vision of the Stalins and Maos and Pol Pots, it is only through human blood that this world can be purified. An earthly paradise can only be built on the ashes of millions of human corpses.

In my study of the Left and its romance with death cults, I was not very surprised to learn in Sally J. Taylor’s biography of this monstrous individual, Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times Man in Moscow, that Duranty was an outcast in his own society, that he was physically repulsive, a drug abuser with a wooden leg, and an engager in satanic sexual orgies. Take from this what you will.