When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  In 1932, and unusually for a journalist, Duranty wrote a poem called Red Square which the New York Times published and illustrated with photographs. He mentioned Lenin’s vision of ‘nothing short of world dominion under one Red Flag’, and drew contrasts between the old and the new: ‘New and vast, utilitarian, ugly, like the Soviet State’. But the poem also contained a particular phrase that his critics have since seized upon as revealing his attitude about sacrifice and change: ‘Russians may be hungry and short of clothes or comfort. But you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’166

  Duranty’s 1931 articles had not only captivated his readers. They also caught the attention of the Pulitzer Prize Committee. In 1932 it awarded him the prize for correspondence, for ‘his series of dispatches on Russia especially the working out of the Five Year Plan’.167 The citation said that his reports were ‘marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity’. In contrast, the New York Times’ anti-Duranty lobby was highly critical and condemned them.168 But no one took much notice of them.

  British diplomats believed that Duranty knew more than he told his readers. One noted in early December 1932 that ‘he has been waking up to the truth for some time … but he has not hitherto let the great American public into the secret’.169 The diplomat, William Strang, recounted that Duranty had sent a despatch ‘by safe hand via Paris’ from where it was cabled to New York and the paper had ‘made a great play of it’. This was the six-part series about increasing food shortages. Duranty told Strang in confidence that the article had created waves: he had received a visit from ‘higher spheres’ – not the Soviet censors. His visitors accused him of stabbing the country in the back, and delivered a warning of dire consequences as relations between the USSR and USA were balanced on a knife edge. Duranty’s concerns grew: if he left the country, as was scheduled, would he be allowed back? Clearly rattled he hung around to see if the trouble would pass. But the visit from the Soviet heavy mob did not stop Duranty from speaking about the increasingly serious food shortage and problems with establishing the scheme of collective farms to the Travellers Club in Paris less than a fortnight later.170

  But Duranty was not alone in giving the Soviet Union generally positive coverage. Other Moscow correspondents did likewise. David Engerman, who in 2003 made a special study of American attitudes to the Soviet Union at that time, has written that the four leading Moscow correspondents – Walter Duranty, Louis Fischer (The Nation), Eugene Lyons (United Press) and William Henry Chamberlin (Christian Science Monitor and the Manchester Guardian) all shared basic assumptions about the Soviet Union. Like many Americans at the time, they were broadly enthusiastic about the rapid pace of change taking place in the country. They knew it would have costs in human terms, but that was the price paid for progress. And, like many observers, they had a low opinion of the Russian people, much like Duranty himself. Engerman noted, ‘The journalists’ calculations of these costs were discounted by their low estimation of Russian national character. Western journalists disparaged the peasantry almost as much as Soviet officials did.’171

  Chamberlin wrote that the peasants’ old lifestyle and values, including their religious faith and customs, which they were reluctant to give up on, were impediments to change. The creation of more efficient collective farms was a step forward from the ‘backward’, pre-revolutionary farming system. He wrote dispassionately about the ‘liquidation [of the kulaks] as a class’, which he defined as peasants who were ‘formerly somewhat better off’ and who ‘were therefore regarded by the Soviet as exploiters’. He explained that the use of food – or rather lack of it – was a way of restoring the ‘peasants’ will to work’; and that some of the consequences were due to the destruction of crops and animals by the peasants themselves.172 He told the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London early in 1933 that while the Soviet policies were succeeding in drawing the mass of the peasants into the new collective farms, more needed to be done. Mechanisation of the new collectives alone could not solve production problems if the peasants were not at the same time given ‘sufficient incentive to work as hard in the collective farm as in [their] own individual holding’.173

  Louis Fischer, before leaving for a six-month trip to the United States in December 1932, also wrote about the food shortages for The Nation, but said that they were due to ‘bad organisation’ and ‘insufficient loyalty to Moscow’s instructions’, terms that were, in Engerman’s view, ‘cryptic phrases’ and ‘gross understatements’.174

  Taking a benevolent view of the Soviet project undoubtedly helped: Lyons was the first foreign correspondent to be granted an interview with Stalin, but not to be outdone, days later Duranty schemed and followed in his footsteps and secured the first of what would be two exclusive interviews, eclipsing Lyons in the process.175

  But what of the other British journalist, the freelance? His name was Gareth Jones. He was a man on a mission. Passionate, a prolific writer, fluent in Russian, he was acutely concerned for the human condition. He was Welsh and, like Duranty, a Cambridge scholar. He had studied Russian and German. Contemporary photographs show him to have been thin, but looking energetically fit, bespectacled and with a high forehead. He looked as though he had boundless energy. Jones was earnest and a man of conviction. He was politically aware and possessed humanitarian concerns. He was a prolific writer and saw that as his future profession.

  For a short time he had worked in the United States and written about the Great Depression. He had also travelled to the Soviet Union before – in 1930 and 1931, the latter occasion accompanying the American food magnate H. J. Heinz II. After that visit, which also took in the Ukraine, Jones published an account of his visit anonymously, Experiences in Russia 1931 – A Diary.176 He visited the Soviet Union three times in total, and would finally be banned from going back.

  He arrived in Moscow in March 1933 with plans for a walking tour. But he was not a tourist. While in London, where he was assisting former Prime Minister David Lloyd George with his war memoirs, Jones heard stories about a man-made famine in the Ukraine where millions were dying and he wanted to do something about it. At the beginning of 1933 Jones had gone to Germany to witness the elections that would bring Hitler to power. While in Berlin he heard more stories, some from Polish diplomats. He planned to gather information about what was going on and write about it once he was back in the West. He little knew that the next months would be explosive, and little appreciated what their outcome would be.

  Famine

  It would not have been a great surprise to the foreign journalists in Moscow that the food shortages and agricultural problems that they had written about in late 1932 would get worse. Rumours circulated that conditions were bad in the Ukraine, among other places. Details were scant, but the news had already spread beyond the Soviet Union’s borders.

  Duranty had heard that the news was bad from freelance journalist Maurice Hindus and others, as he told British diplomats late in 1932.177 But in public he was dismissive. He had already told his readers in November 1932 that the costs would be high. But rather than investigate further he chose to remain in Moscow and report what he knew would interest his readers the most: a dramatic spy story. One of the major news stories developing in Moscow at the beginning of 1933 was that of six Englishmen, employed by the British engineering firm Metro-Vickers, who were accused of spying and sabotage. They were to be put on public trial, and might face the death penalty.

  But with news of the trial creating so much interest, the stories that Duranty and others heard about starvation in the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other grain-producing areas assumed less importance. There were said to be vast numbers of expulsions, deaths and executions. Whole communities were transported to forced labour camps, animals had disappeared and there were reports of cannibalism.

  Stalin’s policy was that agriculture was to be collectivised and made efficient. Its produce would be sold abroad to earn foreign currency that wo
uld buy the machinery needed to help the country industrialise and modernise. Opposition would be crushed. Peasants were despised. Some Bolsheviks saw them as little better than animals.178 Kulaks were seen as opponents of Communism and vilified.179 A lethal mix of incompetence and the Soviet leadership’s indifference to suffering combined to leave many millions of lives devastated. People died of hunger, disease, sorrow. Whole communities ceased to exist.180

  Not long after Duranty had collected his Pulitzer Prize, Eugene Lyons picked up a report from a Soviet newspaper, Molot (Hammer), which was published in Rostov-on-Don. He realised that one of its stories amounted to an official confirmation of the famine. Unable to investigate himself, he passed it onto two colleagues, Ralph Barnes and William H. Stoneman.181 The pair spent two weeks travelling through the affected areas, witnessing the famine first-hand. Arrested by the secret police, the OGPU (a forerunner of the KGB), they were returned to Moscow, but by then they had already written their stories and arranged for them to be smuggled out of the country via a German fur trader. They were published in the Chicago Daily News and the New York Herald Tribune. After publication the Soviet authorities banned the press from travelling to the affected areas. But Barnes and Stoneman suffered no retributions. However, to stop more news spreading Stalin introduced a system of internal passports which restricted peasants’ movements, stopping them in particular from going to the towns. The measures only disappeared in the late 1970s.

  Meanwhile, yet another British journalist resident in Moscow was taking an interest in the famine story. Malcolm Muggeridge had arrived the previous September with his wife Kitty, a niece of the leading Fabian Beatrice Webb, to report for the Manchester Guardian. Muggeridge admitted being sympathetic to the Soviet Union – as was his paper at the time.182

  Muggeridge travelled to the Ukraine to see for himself what was happening. He later said, ‘It was a big story in all our talks in Moscow. Everybody knew about it … that there was a terrible famine going on.’183 He set off at the end of January, travelling via Rostov-on-Don. He posted his stories to England without first showing them to the censors.184 They were published anonymously by the Manchester Guardian on three consecutive days, beginning on Saturday 25 March 1933. Recognising that he would not be able to stay in the country once the reports came out, Muggeridge left Moscow in early spring, helped by the fact that Chamberlin, the paper’s regular correspondent, had come back earlier than expected from an overseas trip.

  Muggeridge had travelled through three regions. In the Ukraine he saw ‘the same story – cattle and horses dead; fields, neglected: meagre harvest despite moderately good climatic conditions; all the grain that was produced taken by the government; now no bread at all, no bread anywhere, nothing much else either; despair and bewilderment.’185 In the next report he wrote, ‘To say there is famine in some of the most fertile parts of Russia is to say much less than the truth: there is not only famine, but – in the case of the North Caucasus at least – a state of war, a military occupation.’186

  Muggeridge was later furious that the articles had been ‘heavily sub-edited’ and placed in a less prominent position in the paper, which he thought was intended to soften their impact.187

  When Gareth Jones arrived in Moscow he met Malcolm Muggeridge. He arranged a walking tour into the affected area. He was well prepared and had a supply of pocket diaries in which he planned to record what he saw.188 When finished he returned to Moscow, where he spent a few days meeting people before travelling home via Berlin. On 19 March 1933 he met the Foreign Minister, Maxim Litvinov, whom he had met during his previous visit, and Walter Duranty. He noted in his diary, ‘March 19. Moscow. 1) Met Litvinoff [sic]. 2) I don’t trust Duranty. He still believes in Collectivisation.’189

  What Jones did next would set him against Walter Duranty and caused a controversy that still lingers on. Jones wanted to tell the world about the famine and get help for the starving masses; Duranty did not.190

  The story breaks

  Shocked at what he had seen, when Jones reached Berlin he decided to hold a press conference. The billing must have been dramatic because it drew newspapers and news agencies from both sides of the Atlantic. The Manchester Guardian carried Reuters’ report on 30 March – two days after Muggeridge’s final despatch had appeared. Jones, the report said, had ‘walked alone through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, “There is no bread. We are dying.” This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia.’ It quoted Jones’s account of a train journey: ‘A Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it.’ But, directly below this story The Guardian placed a report of a talk given to the Workers’ Education League. The speaker, P. A. Sloan, had said that ‘starvation had existed with far greater severity in pre-revolutionary days and peasants now tended to complain a lot more because they were so much better off under the new regime’. Sloan criticised reporters in the USSR for failing to make contact with workers or students.191

  In America reports appeared on 29 March. Edgar Ansel Mowrer wrote in the Chicago Daily News that ‘Jones saw famine on a huge scale and the revival of a murderous terror. The Russians are thoroughly alarmed over this situation and, he explains the arrest of British engineers recently as a maniac measure following the shooting by the government of thirty-five prominent agricultural workers.’192

  In London, the Daily Express also printed the Reuters report on 30 March, concluding, ‘In short, said Mr Jones, the government’s policy of collectivisation and the peasants’ resistance to it, had brought Russia to the worst catastrophe since the famine of 1921 swept away the population of whole districts.’193 Below that was a short piece about the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, who had said that the Metro-Vickers engineers would be given a ‘just and fair trial’ and that ‘we must not allow ourselves to be carried away by the passion of the moment’.194 On 1 April the paper published a trailer for a series of articles by Gareth Jones that were due to appear the following week.

  The backlash begins

  Two days after Jones’s press conference, and possibly pressed by his editors, Walter Duranty filed a report. In an article entitled ‘Russians Hungry, but Not Starving’, he wrote, ‘In the middle of the diplomatic duel between Great Britain and the Soviet Union over the accused British engineers there appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with “thousands already dead and millions menaced by death and starvation.”’195 He continued,

  Mr Jones is a man of a keen and active mind, and he has taken the trouble to learn Russian, which he speaks with considerable fluency, but the writer thought Mr Jones’s judgment was somewhat hasty and asked him on what it was based. It appeared that he had made a forty-mile walk through villages in the neighbourhood of Kharkov and had found conditions bad.

  He went on, ‘I suggested that that was a rather inadequate cross-section of a big country but nothing could shake his conviction of impending doom.’ Duranty then mentioned other stories that, when originally published, were supposed to have been based on eyewitness accounts but were subsequently found to be untrue – ‘all bunk, of course’.

  Duranty said Jones had told him about the hunger, which he knew ‘to be correct not only of some parts of the Ukraine but of sections of the North Caucasus and lower Volga regions and, for that matter, Kazakstan [sic]’. But he said it was a consequence of attempts to drag biblical-times Soviet agriculture into the twentieth century. Farmers had delivered ‘the most deplorable results’. He acknowledged that collectivisation had been mismanaged and that food production was a mess.196 But then, in a chillingly familiar phrase,

  But – to put it brutally – you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and the Bolshevist leaders are just as indifferent to the casualties that may be
involved in their drive toward socialisation as any General during the World War who ordered a costly attack in order to show his superiors that he and his division possessed the proper soldierly spirit.

  Duranty said that after talking to Jones he had made official enquiries about the ‘alleged’ famine. His researches had found that there was a serious food shortage in the country, and malnutrition, which led to disease and death. However, using tortuous logic, ‘there is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation’. He concluded that the situation was definitely bad, ‘but there is no famine’.

  A week later, in another piece, and in a sentence that could easily have come from George Orwell’s 1984, he wrote,

  In the excitement over the Spring sowing campaign and the reports of an increased food shortage, a fact that has been almost overlooked is that the production of coal, pig iron, steel, oil, automobiles, tractors, automotive parts, locomotives and machine tools has increased by 20 to 35 per cent during recent months.

  He continued, ‘That is the most effective proof that the food shortage as a whole is less grave than was believed – or, if not, at least distribution has greatly improved, which comes to the same thing for practical purposes.’197 This was Duranty writing more like a Soviet public relations officer and less like the critical foreign correspondent he was supposed to be.

  It took nearly a month for Jones’s reply to Duranty’s reports to get into the New York Times. In a passionate letter, published on 1 May 1933, Jones thanked Duranty for his kindness and helpfulness, but, he said, ‘I stand by my statement that Soviet Russia is suffering from a severe famine.’ He then listed his sources: ‘foreign observers’, private conversations with nearly thirty diplomats, peasants, German colonists and journalists. The latter, he said, had been turned ‘into masters of euphemism and understatement’ by Russian censorship. ‘Hence they give “famine” the polite name of “food shortage” and “starving to death” is softened down to read as “widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition”.’ He mentioned that Muggeridge’s articles supported him. He had not seen, he said, ‘dead human beings nor animals’ in villages, ‘but one does not need a particularly nimble brain to grasp that even in the Russian famine districts the dead are buried and that there the dead animals are devoured’. He ended by remarking how successful the Soviet Foreign Office had been in ‘concealing the true situation in the USSR’.