COMMENTARY: The Times and Duranty - time to up the ante (05/23/04)

COMMENTARY: The Times and Duranty - time to up the ante

by Marko Suprun

Up until March 23 of this year, the Walter Duranty plaque at the New York Times had a one-sentence footnote that read "Other writers at the Times, and elsewhere, have discredited this coverage." On April 19 the disclaimer was enlarged to a full page and now almost eclipses Duranty's picture. Did Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and The Times have a change of heart in those 28 days?

Certainly not. The enlarged statement is a glib response to the efforts of Ukrainian organizations to "cancel Duranty's prize." Duranty was the first in a long line of propagandists to develop a Holodomor denial movement and minimize the Communist genocide against Ukrainians - a movement that has outlived the political life span of the Soviet Union. The New York Times provided Duranty with a forum to promote his denials. Therefore, it is complicit in the denial.

Despite the shortcomings of the new disclaimer, the organizers of the 2003 letter campaign were more successful than originally thought. The thousands of people, Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians alike, who sent in letters and postcards to the Pulitzer Committee produced a tangible result. The disclaimer is indeed larger.

I was inspired by the people and organizers of the 2003 letter campaign and bought shares in The New York Times in order to attend the annual shareholders' meeting held on April 13. Doing so allowed me to voice my concerns directly to Mr. Sulzberger, the board of directors and other shareholders. As the son of a Holodomor survivor, I was compelled to keep the pressure on.

It is time to up the ante. Consider for a moment what the reaction of The New York Times would have been had everyone who sent in a letter appeared in person at the annual shareholders meeting and voiced their opinions.

Between now and the next shareholders' meeting, we can accomplish the following. First and foremost, the term Holodomor must penetrate standard English and be on par with the term Holocaust. A letter campaign must be directed at the board of the American Heritage Dictionary, Webster's Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language to recognize Holodomor as a word used to summarize the genocide of Ukrainians by the Communists.

Secondly, Walter Duranty must be called a Holodomor denier. The label has to stick like crazy glue. Malcom Muggeridge and Gareth Jones, two writers who also witnessed the Holodomor but reported it, are sources Ukrainians can cite. Professors in the U.S. and Canada have reached out to their contemporaries in Ukraine to accelerate work and research on the Holodomor. Their continued efforts will prove beyond all doubt that Duranty and others had an agenda to deny the genocide.

Third, Ukrainian Americans who are members of the Democratic Party should start a campaign to have the Democratic National Committee publicly denounce the Communist ideology and its party formation verbally and in print, wherever and whenever possible. The Democratic Party in the United States continues to accept the endorsement of the Communist Party of the United States and, in so doing, they lend legitimacy to the CPUSA, which in turn continues to minimize the crimes of communism. Sen. John Kerry, the de-facto Democratic presidential candidate must be encouraged to vehemently reject the endorsement of the CPUSA for the 2004 elections. This will throw a very large monkey wrench in the Holodomor denial movement.

Ukrainians in other countries who are members of center-left political parties (the Liberal Party in Canada, the Labor Party in England, for example) should be encouraged to do the same. Members of the Socialist Party in Ukraine should convince their leader, Oleksander Moroz, to also issue similar proclamations denouncing communism and the Communist Party.

Finally and most importantly, Ukrainians must convince The New York Times to voluntarily return Duranty's Pulitzer, print as detailed a retraction and denouncement of his denials (they must allocate at least as much space to this as they did to the Jayson Blair scandal) and then allocate space for the memoirs of Holodomor survivors. The memoirs must be printed annually and indefinitely in the Sunday edition that follows the official Ukrainian National Day of Remembrance, which is the fourth Sunday of every November.

This is not as far-fetched as you might imagine. Being a shareholder is an empowerment. The old colloquialism "put your money where your mouth is" has incredible weight for corporate America. Be prepared to lose some of your money; the shares I bought have depreciated. So what? The lives and memories of millions of Ukrainians and, in particular, the lives of my Dad's two younger brothers, are priceless.

Think of it this way: the chairman and the board are bound by a duty to acknowledge the concerns of their shareholders. Letters can be ignored ad infinitum.

In reality, you will be expressing the voice of a Ukrainian starved to death by communism. You'll put a smile on someone's face in heaven. I know I did.

Hope to see you there.

Marko Suprun is originally from Winnipeg, the first city in the world to erect a memorial to the victims of the Holodomor. He holds an M.A. in comparative politics from Columbia University in New York and is currently working on a documentary about the genocide of Ukrainians.

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