“But in 1933, the watershed year, when Stalin finally achieved U.S. recognition, disquieting rumors had begun to surface. There was a growing number of reports about a famine, purported to have taken place in the grain-growing districts of the Ukraine, the Northern Caucausus, and across the nomadic cattle country of Kazakhstan: a disaster that cost the lives of millions of peasants, a calamity of incalculable dimensions. For later generations, as the sheer magnitude of that event began slowly to emerge, questions would arise as to why nobody knew, why the American public hadn’t been told. How did Stalin manage to conceal the greatest man-made disaster in modern history, when perhaps as many as ten million men, women, and children were allowed to die by slow starvation as a result of their refusal to conform to Stalin’s plan to collectivize agriculture?”
The answer, in a name, is Walter Duranty. And this weekend I’m re-reading S.J. Taylor’s superb, painstakingly thorough revelation of this pseudo-journalist and despicable man, Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow.
