All the News Unfit to Print by Eric Burns

Author:Eric Burns
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2010-05-11T04:30:00+00:00

In the United States, opposition to Duranty among his fellow journalists, which had been festering for some time, reached a peak. On the next to last day of 1934, more than a year after the article just cited, syndicated Washington columnist Joseph Alsop, writing his final column before retirement, said that Duranty “covered up the horrors and deluded an entire generation by prettifying Soviet realities. . . . He lived comfortably in Moscow, too, by courtesy of the KGB.” He was “a fashionable prostitute.” Alsop went on to say that “lying was his stock in trade.” It was as powerful an indictment as a responsible journalist, which Alsop certainly was, had ever made publicly against a fellow analyst of events.

Eugene Lyons, the United Press correspondent in the Soviet Union during the famine, agreed with Alsop about Duranty’s KGB connection and went further, stating that the Soviets had provided him with an apartment, a car, and a mistress named Katya. The KGB charge may or may not be true; it does seem that Duranty, if not actually in the agency’s employ, did communicate with them from time to time. About the car and apartment there are differing opinions. That Duranty had a mistress named Katya, who depended on him for nylons and makeup, who reported back to government officials about him, and who, according to Muggeridge, even had a child by him, there is no doubt.

Muggeridge kept up a drumbeat of criticism against Duranty once he returned to Great Britain, continuing to produce articles and speak out in public forums about his fellow Englishman’s duplicitous reporting. Duranty was, he proclaimed, “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism.” Why? Muggeridge concluded that Duranty was less fascinated with socialism than he was with power, that he worshipped power, wanted nothing more than to kneel in its presence, to witness it in action. In one of his autobiographical volumes, Muggeridge, by this time a devout Christian with no socialistic inclinations whatsoever, wrote that Duranty “admired Stalin and his regime precisely because they were so strong and ruthless. ‘I put my money on Stalin,’ was one of his favourite sayings. It was the sheer power generated that appealed to him.”

In fact, Muggeridge said, “I had the feeling . . . that in . . . justifying Soviet brutality and ruthlessness, Duranty was in some way getting back for being small, and losing a leg, and not having the aristocratic lineage and classical education he claimed to have. This is probably, in the end, the only real basis of the appeal of such regimes as Stalin’s, and later Hitler’s; they compensate for weakness and inadequacy.”

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