EDITORIAL: Pulitzer by fraud (04/06/03)

EDITORIAL

Pulitzer by fraud

The Washington Times on March 29 carried a story by Natalia Feduschak reporting that Ukrainian Americans have begun a campaign to revoke the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Walter Duranty, the infamous denier of the Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933.

The action apparently was begun by the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, which issued a call to action in its Bulletin. From there, the UCCA exhortation to begin a letter-writing campaign directed at the Pulitzer committee (Sig Gissler, Administrator, The Pulitzer Prizes, Columbia University, 709 Journalism Building, 2950 Broadway, New York, NY 10027) was picked up by Internet users. Concurrently, others have urged the Ukrainian community to send letters to the publisher of The New York Times (Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., Publisher, The New York Times, 229 W. 43rd St., New York, NY 10036) to pressure the paper to voluntarily give up the 1932 Pulitzer Prize obtained by fraud by its Moscow correspondent.

Duranty got the Pulitzer "for his series of dispatches on Russia, especially the working out of the Five-Year Plan." In fact, it was that Five-Year Plan for the Soviet economy that led to the genocidal famine that killed 7 million to 10 million in Ukraine. Duranty's reports were filled with glowing reports about the success of collectivization and the great Soviet "experiment." Later, Duranty denied there was a famine - although he told British diplomats that 10 million had died due to famine.

But that is not all. In 1987 Dr. James Mace, speaking at a conference on "Recognition and Denial of Genocide and Mass Killing in the 20th Century" cited a declassified State Department document: a memorandum written by a U.S. Embassy staffer in Berlin based on a conversation with Duranty that noted: "in agreement with The New York Times and the Soviet authorities," Duranty's dispatches always "reflect(ed) the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own." Thus, his reporting was not his own; moreover, it was Soviet propaganda. After receiving a copy of the document, Times Executive Editor Max Frankel responded: the revelation "doesn't seem to qualify as news. It's really history, and belongs in history books."

A major turnaround came on June 24, 1990, when Karl A. Meyer of The Times, writing in "The Editorial Notebook," acknowledged that what Duranty wrote from his Moscow post constituted "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper" and noted that Duranty's misdeeds were detailed in "Stalin's Apologist" (1990). In that highly acclaimed book Dr. S. J. Taylor reports that, in his acceptance speech at the Pulitzer ceremony in May 1932, Duranty said the Bolsheviks "are doing the best for the Russian masses," adding that he had learned "to respect the Soviet leaders, especially Stalin, whom I consider to have grown into a really great statesman."

Still, The Times had yet to tell the whole truth. In a 2001 special supplement dedicated to the paper's 150th anniversary, Executive Editor Howell Raines explained to readers that, though its slogan is "All the News That's Fit to Print," "... important news slips by because our coverage reflects blind spots that we recognize only in retrospect ... We know we make mistakes, and we hate them, but we do not fear them to the point of timidity, as long as they are made in the course of intellectually honest work and are promptly corrected." Nonetheless, you guessed it, the Famine was not one of the mistakes acknowledged in that supplement.

Even more recently, the book "Written into History" (hardcover, 2001; paperback, 2002), which contains Pulitzer Prize reporting of the 20th century from The Times, lists Duranty among the paper's Pulitzer winners, but with the parenthetical notation "Other writers in The Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage."

An editor's note and an asterisk, however, are not enough.

Questioned by The Washington Times writer cited at the top of this editorial, Catherine Mathis, vice-president of corporate communications for The New York Times Co., said: "The Pulitzer Board has reviewed the Duranty prize several times over the years, and the board has never seen fit to revoke it." She added, "In that situation, The Times has not seen merit in trying to undo history."

Perhaps The New York Times cannot undo history, but it can set the record straight. And part of setting the record straight would be to return Duranty's ill-gotten Pulitzer. To bring just a tiny measure of justice - albeit 70 years late - for the millions of victims of Stalin, there can be no Pulitzer Prize associated with Walter Duranty's name.

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