The story has been told many times. However, since I happen to be reading Mona Charen’s “Useful Idiots,” let me quote her summary (page 87):
In the 1930’s Duranty [the Times Moscow reporter] would play a critical role in debunking the “propaganda” that the USSR was experiencing a famine.
But, of course, the famine was quite real – not to mention intentional – and took the lives of at least ten million people. In was later called the “terror-famine” because it was the first time in modern history that any nation intentionally starved its own people. But readers of the New York Times heard nothing of it from their renowned Moscow correspondent. We know, through letters and other contemporaneous documents, that Duranty was well aware of the misery being imposed on Russia’s Peasants by the forced collectivization of agriculture. But his dispatches featured cheerleading accounts of the marvels of Soviet agriculture, stories that earned him the Pulitzer Prize “for dispassionate, interpretive reporting from Russia.” Only much later did his reputation suffer when it became impossible to deny that his reporting had been a skein of falsehoods.
Malcolm Muggeridge, the foreign correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, was the only Soviet sympathizer in the USSR who reported on the famine at the time. No prizes were issued to him. Instead he was often branded a liar. … At the end of the twentieth century, it was learned that Duranty had been not a dupe but a blackmail victim.
Charen continues to describe how leading intellectuals defended the Soviet Union and dismissed critics as prejudice. Robert Conquest, of the Hoover Institution, has written extensively on the famine. I believe he wrote the first book on the subject - in the 1980s!
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