But—to put it brutally—you can’t make an omelette without break- ing eggs…” These were the words that Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s correspondent in Russia during the early Soviet years, used to explain away the devastating Ukrainian famine of the 1930s perpetrated by Russia’s communist government1. The famine was not a moderate temporary food shortage. It was not people substituting black bread for white bread, or eating grain instead of meat. It was a mass murder of starvation, in part a product of the new Soviet socialist system and its drive for collectivization, and in part a deliberate genocide.
Duranty, who was the New York Times’s leading correspondent in Russia at the time, saw nothing particularly amiss. In his “breaking eggs” Times article of March 31, 1933,6 Duranty flatly denied that there was a famine at all. “In short, conditions are definitely bad in certain sections—the Ukraine, North Caucasus and Lower Volga,” he wrote. “The rest of the country is on short rations but nothing worse. These conditions are bad but there is no famine.”
Duranty did not stop there. He went on in his article to attempt to discredit the statements of a Western journalist, British reporter Gareth Jones, who got the story of the famine painfully right.7 Duranty told New York Times readers that he had initially believed Jones’s account that there was “virtually no bread” in many villages but that Jones had not seen dead animals or people. However, Duranty claimed that after speaking with Jones, he went out and “made exhaustive inquiries about this alleged famine situation.”8 By his own account, Duranty’s exhaustive inquiries amounted to speaking with official commissariats (the Soviet equivalent of a ministry of state), chatting with foreign embassies, gathering information from “Britons working as specialists” and “personal connections.” While the information of the correspondent who had advanced the opposing view (that a famine actually was occurring) was firsthand, all of Duranty’s information was secondhand.
Duranty wasn’t just a regular correspondent. He was a journalistic superstar, among the most famous reporters in America and possibly the world. Duranty could not have achieved this fame without the huge platform that the Times provided him, which not only legitimized his opinions but projected his voice onto an international stage. This is exactly why Duranty’s reporting, like that of Guido Enderis, wasn’t just “slovenly” (as the Times would later try to pass off the debacle of its famine reporting),12 bad, or faulty—it was deadly.
The New York Times made another journalistically unusual move when it wrote a news report about one of its own correspondents meeting a state politician. That reporter was, of course, Walter Duranty. And the politician was New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. What made the meeting newsworthy, and what gives it historical value, was the fact that on that day, July 25, 1932, Roosevelt was just a little more than three months away from being elected president of the United States, and less than a decade away from being at the helm of the world’s most powerful country during its most terrible war.
Most accounts of Walter Duranty and his journalistic sins focus on the man himself. There are many theories that explain why Duranty botched a story that was so big right at a time when it was so critical. Duranty has been alternately accused of being a severe opportunist, an ardent communist, a reckless adventurer, and a philanderer. In truth, he was probably a mix of all these things, some to a greater degree than others. However, the single most direct and straightforward explanation for Duranty’s absolute failure in reporting on Russia is the one that is the most downplayed: that once all the excuses and psycho-biographies are swept aside, the real failure did not belong to Walter Duranty—it belonged to his newspaper, the New York Times.
The Times’s slack or nonexistent oversight of Duranty’s reporting put his false, unsourced stories on the pages of the Gray Lady. But it was his Pulitzer Prize that inducted Walter Duranty into a class of New York Times elites which gave the correspondent a virtual free pass that got even his most egregious news articles past Times editors without so much as a quick glance at the vague and often non-existing sources, the bizarre editorializing (such as the one about breaking eggs to make an omelet), and the factual claims that were contradicted by other journalists of international stature who were sending home eyewitness accounts of the famine and death-ravaged swaths of Russia and the Ukraine.
The more entangled Duranty became in his own web of lies, the more the Times became entangled with them. And with the 1932 Pulitzer Prize, the Times had even more of a reason to turn a blind eye to the fraud being perpetrated by Duranty against the victims of the terrible famine and against American newspaper readers who, unbeknownst to them, were also being dragged into a cynically crafted myth about Soviet Russia, one that—as we will soon see—had enormous political repercussions which changed the course of history.
Duranty’s celebrity status led the New York Times to print a number of unusual articles about its reporter, such as the one that quotes the Russia correspondent on the issue of war with Japan and Germany. In 1936, Times editors dedicated an entire article to a talk Duranty gave to foreign correspondents. The headline of the article was “Duranty Talks of Job.” The article’s slug read, “Tells Foreign Correspondents How They Should Work.” At that talk, Duranty managed to sum up the philosophy of journalism which drove him to craft a picture of the new Russia as an emerging socialist wonderland, rather than to simply deliver facts and straightforward reporting to the readers of the Times and the American public at large. Duranty opined at the talk: There are two angles to a newspaper man’s reporting, sensations and facts and between the two we are constantly torn. We must keep a close relationship to our job, to life and to truth, not forgetting the public which wants sensation to make reading less dull.
Duranty lived up to this personal code of journalism—at least the second half of it. While he was not just willing to provide “sensation” but extremely skilled at it, he was less than worried if the truth had to be sacrificed here and there, or in its entirety, in order to “make reading less dull.”
By 1934, Duranty was back to reporting in a way that would have put the most enthusiastic Soviet propagandists to shame. On May 9, the New York Times, which had now taken to reporting on the travel plans of its star journalist, ran a story reporting that Walter Duranty had made it back to the United States.17 The Times even went so far as to specify the ship and the shipping line on which Duranty had traveled (the Bremen of the North German Lloyd line). The report cut quickly to Duranty’s appraisal of the situation in Russia, which, to paraphrase it into two short words, was that things were very good. Duranty told the Times that “The health of the people has improved and the birth rate has doubled.” While the first claim was too subjective to either confirm or contradict, the second one, that the birth rate had doubled in two years, would make a demographer chuckle. But it was the rest of Duranty’s assessment of the situation in Russia, as reported by the Times, that would be truly laughable—if it had not been so damning.
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