Pulitzer board asked to revoke prize

JOSEPH Stalin was in a benevolent mood on Christmas Day, 1933, lavishing praise on carefully selected favourites. "You have done a good job in your reporting the USSR, though you are not a Marxist, because you try to tell the truth about our country," he told Walter Duranty, the award-winning Moscow correspondent with the New York Times.

Stalin might have been a monster, but he could recognise an opportunist when he saw one. He told Duranty: "I might say that you bet on our horse to win when others thought it had no chance and I am sure you have not lost by it."

The tyrant was right. Duranty had predicted Stalin’s rise and as the Communist leader climbed to power, so too did Duranty’s coverage of the Soviet Union win him fame and fortune. Confirmation of his place in the pantheon of American journalism had come when he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his reporting on Stalin’s Five Year Plan. The Pulitzer board praised Duranty’s stories for their "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity".

Now, a well-organised and impassioned campaign by Ukrainians in the United States, Canada and around the world has persuaded the Pulitzer to convene a committee to consider revoking Duranty’s prize. The Pulitzer board has received thousands of postcards and letters demanding that it correct, however belatedly, what Ukrainians view as a historic wrong. Seventy years ago, the Ukraine was just about the most desperate, ghastly place on Earth. Stalin’s henchmen had, wrote Malcolm Muggeridge in the Fortnightly Review, "gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible".

In 1932-33, as many as ten million Ukrainians died in an act of merciless state-sponsored genocide as Stalin determined to crush any remaining vestiges of Ukrainian national identity.

Muggeridge called Duranty "the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism", while George Orwell included Duranty’s name on the list of Communist sympathisers he submitted to the Foreign Office.

Duranty frequently and casually admitted he knew famine was sweeping the Ukraine, but was fond of commenting that "you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs".

To date, the Pulitzer has declined to comment on when the sub-committee investigating Duranty’s prize will report its findings.

No Pulitzer has ever been revoked, although the Washington Post returned the prize its correspondent, Judith Cooke, received in 1981 after her harrowing story of an eight-year-old heroin addict, entitled Jimmy’s World, was revealed to be a fabrication.

Jimmy never existed, just as, for Duranty, the starving millions of the Ukraine might as well have never lived. They were, after all, just an impediment to the heroic construction of the Soviet Union.