When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  Other Moscow-based foreign correspondents also cast doubt on Jones’s story. Meanwhile in Britain Muggeridge faced criticism from those who believed strongly in the great strides that Moscow was making in modernising its agriculture. He was called a liar, or labelled naive. His attackers included George Bernard Shaw and the historian A. J. P. Taylor, as well as his in-laws, the Webbs.

  There was a strand of opinion in Europe that was dismissive of such stories. A month before Muggeridge’s articles had appeared, the Manchester Guardian published a letter signed by George Bernard Shaw and twenty others saying how ‘particularly offensive and ridiculous is the revival of the old attempts to represent the condition of Russian workers as one of slavery and starvation’.198 Muggeridge noted that a group of admirers, including the Webbs, were in denial about unpalatable Russian news. ‘It’s true that in the USSR people disappear…’ Muggeridge later recalled Beatrice Webb saying to him before he left for Moscow.

  He later felt that such people secretly admired Stalin’s power. ‘Though they professed admiration for Stalin’s economic and industrial achievements, it was ultimately his immense power that commanded their respect and even reverence.’199 Others believed that the detractors ‘avoided exposure to the famine’ and were ‘shown only what the Russians wanted them to see’.200

  Reviewing the issue over sixty years later Muggeridge’s biographer, Richard Ingrams, said:

  If not actually contradicting the Muggeridge/Jones account, Duranty and the New York Times had succeeded in creating a smokescreen of doubt. And in the meantime, editors had focused their attention, as far as Russia was concerned, on the trial of the Metro-Vickers engineers. The fate of six British citizens was considered more newsworthy than that of 6 million or so Russian peasants.201

  But why was Jones singled out for criticism? There were probably several reasons. He was committed, earnest and plausible. His very independence and obvious sincerity made him dangerous, from Moscow’s point of view. He had independently validated other published reports about the famine – some, such as Muggeridge’s, based on eyewitness testimony, others published by correspondents resident outside the Soviet Union. The New York Times, for instance, also printed stories about the famine – using the word famine that Duranty could not bring himself to use – written by its Vienna correspondent. But, of course, they were not direct eyewitness accounts.

  But Jones’s independence also meant that he was unable to count on support from powerful backers. Engerman argues that because Jones was not a regular Moscow correspondent who might be persuaded by the news censors to tone down what they considered to be unhelpful news, he needed to be rubbished because little other pressure could be brought to bear. To help them the press censors ‘drafted in the Moscow regulars’ to undermine Jones’s credibility.

  But Duranty was not entirely alone in denying what Gareth Jones had said. All four of the leading Moscow correspondents bore their share of the blame, although some later recanted.

  Louis Fischer had denied the story even though at the time of Jones’ press conference he was on a lecture tour in the United States.

  Eugene Lyons went back to New York less than a year after the famine story first broke.202 He later admitted that on his return to America he had written hesitantly phrased stories about the famine because, he said, US-based ‘Soviet sympathizers and liberals treated him as a renegade’ and that his early descriptions of the scale of the famine ‘fell far short of the horrible conditions that he knew had existed’.203 He later lost faith in the Soviet project and ultimately became a hawk in his attitudes towards the USSR. Writing in 1937 about his and others’ performance in reporting the story, Lyons said, ‘The dividing line between “heavy loss of life” through food shortage and “famine” is rather tenuous. Such verbal finessing made little difference to the millions of dead and dying, to the refugees who knocked at our doors begging bread…’204

  Of Jones’s story, Lyons observed,

  …on emerging from Russia, Jones made a statement which, startling though it sounded, was little more than a summary of what the correspondents and foreign diplomats had told him. To protect us, and perhaps with some idea of heightening the authenticity of his reports, he emphasized his Ukrainian foray rather than our conversation as the chief source of his information.205

  He continued by saying that the Moscow correspondents had collectively complied with the Soviet authorities’ wish to kill the story.

  Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes – but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials.206

  The revelation hardly caused ripples.

  A US Congressional Commission into the Ukrainian famine was established in the 1980s. It reported in April 1988, concluding that Duranty and Fischer had taken the lead in the denials.207

  To many observers Fischer’s part in the cover-up was based on a view that ‘the truth could only damage Soviet efforts to gain diplomatic recognition, stall Litvinov’s anti-Fascist initiatives, and, most important, set back the Five Year Plan’.208 Some of Duranty’s critics charged that he had received money and favours from the Soviets, but this was dismissed by James Crowl, who made a study of the case. Crowl wrote that ‘for years [Duranty] had admired the Soviets and had been convinced that they were doing what was best for Russia, even though the cost in lives and suffering was high’.209

  So what explains Duranty’s actions? Was he a mouthpiece or did he genuinely believe, as Stalin did, that the price was worth it and that peasants had brought it on themselves by resisting collectivisation? Muggeridge thought that Duranty was simply seduced by power and those who wielded it.

  But it is also important to consider the atmosphere in which the Moscow correspondents worked. Soviet news management should not be underrated. Aware that news of the famine could prove very damaging for Russia’s interests abroad, the Soviet government arranged for the Foreign Office Press Department, the NKID, to apply pressure to silence the Western correspondents. The department was headed by Konstantin Oumansky, and a small team of multilingual censors kept the foreign correspondents under control. The pressure – and sometimes blackmail – included threats not to renew visas, to bar correspondents from the Metro-Vickers trial and presumably some things more personal. Richard Ingrams found the threat of being kept from the Metro-Vickers trial a credible reason for correspondents’ compliance.

  Even though Oumansky’s team was small it approved every telegram before it was sent and reports were rejected, sometimes amidst threats and abuse from both sides.210 The team received feedback from Soviet embassies abroad, giving it a reasonable idea about what was leaking out of the country. Overseas, Soviet diplomats approached foreign editors and journalists offering corrective steers about the news and suggesting angles they might pursue. Fifty years later, the 1980s Congressional Commission noted that ‘censorship made many journalists far more circumspect than Jones’.211 Some correspondents like Walter Duranty appear to have understood what they could get passed and did not push at the boundaries. But that was just a step away from becoming complicit; and it was far removed from Duranty’s experience in wartime France twenty years earlier.212

  In 1934 Malcolm Muggeridge published a novel based on his experiences in Moscow. In the preface he gave a frank description of the pressures under which journalists worked.

  There is stiff censorship, of course; but it is not generally known that foreign journalists work under perpetual threat of losing their visas, and therefore their jobs. Unless they consent (and most of them do) to limit their news to what will not be displeasing … they are subjected to continuous persecution…213

  He added that Russian friends or relatives might also be targeted if other methods did not work. ‘The result i
s that news from Russia is a joke, being either provided by men whom long residence in Moscow has made docile, or whose particular relationship with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat puts its words into their mouths…’ He may well have had Duranty in his sights with that description – one of the novel’s characters, Jefferson, is loosely based on him.

  A glimpse of other dynamics at work is also provided by a memorandum written by a Berlin-based American diplomat. He met Duranty in June 1931. A. W. Kliefoth told Washington what Duranty had said: ‘In agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities, his official despatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet regime, not his own.’214

  Like William Strang’s observation that Duranty held back on telling his readers what he knew, the Congressional Commission accepted there were occasions when Duranty had privately conceded the scale of the Ukrainian famine might be ten million deaths, but had refrained from sharing that information with his readers. ‘But they’re only Russians,’ he is said to have remarked privately.215

  Were there other possible explanations? There is the valid question why in 1921 Lenin’s government had been prepared to reveal how bad the famine was, and to accept international aid, whereas in 1933 Stalin was not. It is possible that in Stalin’s desire to beat the last of the resistance out of the peasants and to complete collectivisation, the Soviets could not very well admit to there being a famine and then refuse any aid that followed. National pride and not wanting to lose face is another possible explanation. Some have asked whether Stalin ‘preferred to sacrifice millions of lives rather than Soviet prestige’.216

  The 1980s Congressional Commission thought that Duranty had ‘been taken by surprise’.217 Maybe Duranty had been caught out, just like the American diplomat he caught out with his Latvian scoop. Or did he panic to conceal his lack of enterprise and smug laziness?

  More reports about the famine appeared in the West over the summer of 1933 and Duranty came under pressure from the paper’s editors to investigate. The Metro-Vickers trial was over and New York knew that he was free to go and see for himself.

  He filed reports in August that implied that censorship was taking its toll on the news coming out of the country. But what he told British diplomats did not leach into his reports. In a minute dated 26 September 1933, William Strang reported to the British Foreign Office in London that he had spoken to Duranty, who had just returned from a visit to the famine areas with ‘Mr Richardson of the Associated Press’. Passing the report on to ‘The King, Cabinet, Dominions’, Strang’s colleague, T. A. Shone, noted, ‘Mr Duranty considers it possible that 10 million people have died, directly or indirectly, for lack of food, during the last year, & I think this estimate exceeds any that we have yet had.’218 What Duranty had seen and heard revealed to him the scale of the events that Jones, Muggeridge and the others had written about. Did that ‘understanding’ between the New York Times and the Soviet government that he had mentioned to Kliefoth two years earlier figure in downplaying the story?

  Duranty retired from Moscow in March 1934, but not before he had received one more accolade. He was a firm believer that Russia and the United States should establish firm diplomatic relations. It seemed peculiar to many that after fifteen years official ties between the two countries still had not been restored. ‘Duranty strongly believed that US recognition of Russia was essential to counter the growing military strength of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.’219 Acknowledging his growing stature as a foreign correspondent he had been summoned to meet the Governor of New York in the summer of 1932. Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt was campaigning for the Presidency. The meeting had gone well and lasted several hours. ‘I asked all the questions,’ Roosevelt said, ‘it was fascinating.’220

  Within months of his election as President Roosevelt achieved one of his policy goals: the restoration of diplomatic relations between the two countries. In the months leading up to the announcement, and as news of the famine emerged, Ukrainian groups in the United States did their best to focus attention on the famine and pressed Roosevelt to ask for an investigation of conditions in the Ukraine before granting recognition. But it came to naught. In November 1933 Duranty accompanied Soviet Foreign Minister Litvinov to the United States, securing an interview en route. At a dinner held in New York to mark the announcement a few days later President Roosevelt was generous in his praise for Duranty, whom he called ‘one of the great foreign correspondents of modern times’. On his return to Moscow Duranty was granted a second and final exclusive interview with Stalin. It took place on Christmas Day 1933.

  Stories about the famine continued to appear periodically over following months, but Duranty was now no longer keeper of the sacred flame of famine denial, so to speak. He continued to cover Russian stories – including some of the big Moscow show trials held during Stalin’s purges, and there, according to academic analysis, his performance was also less than satisfactory. Again he was shown to have delivered the official version of events without question. His Moscow replacement, Harold Denny, fared no better.221

  Duranty left Moscow in 1934 after nearly fourteen years, but continued to produce occasional articles about the Soviet Union for the New York Times for several more years, kept on an annual retainer. He published several books and was active on the lucrative American lecture circuit until the late 1940s, by which time his career was entering its twilight years. He died in 1957, at the age of seventy-three. On his deathbed he married the American woman Anna Enwright, who had been his companion for the last eight years of his life. She died in 1971 and, following her request, his ashes were placed inside her casket and they were buried together.

  The future was not dazzling for Gareth Jones. He continued his travelling and writing, publishing articles about Stalin’s Russia and other places he visited. While in the Far East in 1935 he was kidnapped by Chinese bandits along with a German fellow traveller, whom some believe to have been a Soviet agent. While the German was released after two days, Jones was not and, in circumstances still unclear, was murdered two weeks later, some suspect on Stalin’s orders.222 He was on the eve of his thirtieth birthday.

  There are many unanswered questions about the famine coverup. Had Duranty played another role – had he been a go-between who tried to keep in check opposition to what Roosevelt was trying to do in opening up diplomatic relations with Russia? Was the New York Times involved too? Was it a case of downplaying the unpleasant in order to achieve a greater prize? Was it a case of not being able to make an omelette without smashing eggs? He was not alone in holding this view. After all, Louis Fischer had published a book in 1931, titled Why Recognize Russia?223

  We now know that in the Second World War Roosevelt was concerned enough to downplay bad news about its ally the USSR. Documents recently released by the US National Archives show how far his administration went to cover up news of the Katyn massacre.224 Is it plausible that FDR had been just as concerned about the famine? Had the pressure from Ukrainian groups in the United States – which was ignored – been a factor? Did their unhelpful arguments need to be undermined in order to weaken them and keep the policy of diplomatic recognition on track?

  When the Congressional Commission studied the events in the 1980s – America and ‘the evil empire’ were then in the final stages of the Cold War – it concluded, ‘The American government had ample and timely information about the Famine but failed to take any steps which might have ameliorated the situation. Instead, the Administration extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet government in November 1933, immediately after the Famine.’ Summarising its reasoning it continued, ‘The Commission has found no evidence that this knowledge played any role in the decision to normalize relations with the Soviet Union.’225 But it was a carefully crafted phrase that left room for doubt.

  The Commission also found that ‘a number of the members of the press actively denied in public what they confirmed in private about the famine.’226 Moreover, it concluded, ‘du
ring the Famine certain members of the American press corps cooperated with the Soviet government to deny the existence of the Ukrainian Famine’. Harsh words indeed. An accusation of line-crossing on a mass scale.

  To Muggeridge, interviewed in 1983, ‘Duranty was the villain of the whole thing … It is difficult for me to see how it could have been otherwise that in some sense he was not in the regime’s power.’227

  The story of Walter Duranty and his lead in denying what he and his Moscow colleagues privately knew to be going on is a sorry tale. It undermines his other journalism, because it focuses attention away from it, but it also illustrates how easy it is to cross the line between being an impartial observer and becoming a protagonist, a cheerleader, a propagandist. Duranty was all three. It is clear that Duranty increasingly boxed himself in as the unintended consequences of his denials became manifest. Trying to maintain a position that was increasingly impossible to hold eventually became too much.

  When, in March 1934, he suggested to his editors that he retire, they readily accepted – perhaps with indecent haste. Engerman suggests that they were pleased because Duranty had been spending increasingly more time on leave away from the USSR and was becoming less effective.228 He struck a deal with his bosses at the New York Times that, for an annual retainer of $5,000, he would travel the Soviet Union for three months a year, writing articles for the paper. The rest of his time was his to use how he pleased. He continued to file reports from Russia for the rest of the decade, wrote books and had some fun. When he sometimes ran out of money his wide circle of faithful friends bailed him out. He never made a career as a writer; his books – apart from a few short stories – were all either memoirs or about current affairs or Russia. He continued to be treated as a star foreign correspondent for many years.