Today, a 30-foot-long bronze wall stands in Washington, DC—and on this wall is the simple image of a wheat field.
It is a monument to the victims of The Holodomor—a monstrous genocide committed by one of the most ruthless and authoritarian regimes in human history.
It is a monument to the victims of The Holodomor—a monstrous genocide committed by one of the most ruthless and authoritarian regimes in human history.
In 1932, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, frustrated that he could not crush Ukrainian nationalism, ordered that grain quotas for Ukrainian fields be raised so high that the peasants working the fields would not be left with enough food to feed themselves.
NKVD troops collected the grain and watched over the populace to prevent them from leaving to find nourishment elsewhere.
As a result of these policies, as many as 7 million Ukrainians died of starvation in 1932 and 1933.
As a result of these policies, as many as 7 million Ukrainians died of starvation in 1932 and 1933.
But while Stalin was conducting an atrocity with few equals in human history, the @nytimes was reporting on the regime’s triumphs of modernization.
Walter Duranty, the Times Moscow bureau chief, won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence for his 1931 series of articles on the Soviet Union.
Pulitzer in hand, he proceeded to perpetrate perhaps the worst incident of fake news in American media history at a time when Americans relied on @nytimes and a handful of other large media outlets to bring them news from around the world.
Duranty’s motivation for covering up the crimes taking place in Ukraine has never been fully ascertained. However, it undoubtedly gave the Bolshevik sympathizer better access to Stalin’s regime, which routinely fed him propaganda.
While privately admitting that many Ukrainians had starved to death, Duranty sent numerous reports back to the United States praising the good work of the Soviet government.
He reported that there had been some deaths from “diseases due to malnutrition,” but called the suggestion that a widespread famine was taking place “malignant propaganda.”
These reports were highly influential in the United States and had enormous impact on U.S.-Soviet relations.
Historian Robert Conquest wrote in his book, “The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine”, that due to the perceived credibility of @nytimes, the American people accepted the fraudulent accounts as true.
Sally J. Taylor wrote in her book “Stalin’s Apologist” that Duranty’s reports helped convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt to extend official diplomatic recognition to the Soviet government in November of 1933.
She wrote: “[A]lmost single-handedly did Duranty aid and abet one of the world’s most prolific mass murderers, knowing all the while what was going on but refraining from saying precisely what he knew to be true.”
Though Duranty’s reporting was a lie, @nytimes never questioned its authenticity and dismissed charges that their reporter was cooking up false reports.
