Durantyism: Journalism’s Bubonic Plague

 

Arnold Beichman

      Arnold Beichman, author of Anti-American Myths: Their Causes and Consequences, is a Hoover Institution Research Fellow.

      I begin with the following proposition:

      Probably the greatest triumph in public relations in all recorded history was the elevation in the democratic West of the Soviet Union in its 74-year-existence to a symbol of moral righteousness and a country beyond criticism. [i] This triumph was all the more notable because from Day One of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin’s system, to quote Robert Conquest, “had as one of its main characteristics falsification on an enormous scale.” [ii]

      This success was manifest above all in Western journalism and in many universities. In journalism this triumph was to be found in the attitude of some foreign correspondents and in how they covered the news from Moscow and how their editors let them get away with sophistries that a small town weekly would have deemed impermissible. There was Walter Duranty of the New York Times and others like him who concealed the truth of what is today recognized as having been one of the most inhuman dictatorships of modern times, exceeding even Nazi Germany in its barbarities.

      There is no secret in later years about the warped coverage about the Soviet Union. Here are the words of another New York Times correspondent, Max Frankel, who after years in Moscow wrote:

For the “greatest story in the world” is also the greatest secret in the world. And the lone correspondent is a poor match for a giant, totalitarian government. The story is only rarely to be had on the scene. The scholars will have to dig out what really happened. [iii]

 “What really happened”! In other words what Western correspondents, including Frankel himself, had been reporting about the Soviet Union to democratic publics over the years was either untrue, half-true or meaningless. [iv]

      I begin with a definition of “Durantyism,” a neologism which embodies a concept. It refers to reportage about the Soviet Union (and about other socialist dictatorships right up to and including the Sandinista Nicaragua) in which the journalist lied deliberately or was taken in by Soviet disinformation, or else became a victim of a built-in censorship. [v]

      This lying was made legitimate because it was done on behalf of a supposedly higher truth. [vi] A Duranty journalist need not have been a Communist to have committed the lie of omission if not commission. For example, here is the late Edward Crankshaw, a recognized expert on Soviet affairs, who stated baldly in the London Observer:

Further [the Russians] know very well that, in a number of cases, this newspaper and others deliberately withheld news of Soviet acts of injustice, sometimes for months, in the hope that private representations behind the scenes might secure relief for the victims without loss of face for the Soviet government. [vii]

      Durantyism didn’t begin with Walter Duranty’s coverage of the former Soviet Union, which a New York Times editorial note in 1990 described as “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.” [viii] Looking at it retrospectively, one can say that Durantyism began even before Duranty. It began with the Bolshevik revolution and continued until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. [ix]

      In 1920, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, later editor of the New York Times editorial page, published a long article in the New Republic called “A Test of the News.” The pamphlet revealed that on 91 occasions the Times between Nov. 1917 and Nov. 1919 reported from Riga, Latvia that the Bolshevik regime had fallen or was about to fall; among these occasions:

14 times — Bolshevik regime fallen or about to fall;

4 times — Lenin and Trotsky were reported as preparing to flee;

3 times — they had already fled;

2 times — Lenin reported retiring;

3 times — Lenin thrown into prison;

1 time — Lenin reported killed. [x]

      Not only were these stories untrue but there is every possibility that these stories were an early example of Leninist disinformation. The foreign correspondents in Riga were fed these stories so as to prevent a possible Allied invasion, particularly by the British. If the Bolshevik regime was so weak as reported by the Times and other newspapers, why invade? A policy of wait-and-see might be the way to strangle the infant in its cradle, to use Winston Churchill’s metaphor at the time. [xi]

      In my opinion, the 74 years during which the Bolsheviks ruled were the dark ages of democratic journalism for which the world paid heavily. Had the truth been forthcoming in the daily press, the magazines, radio and latterly television, the Kremlin might never have conquered half of Europe and turned sectors of the Western half into silent or enthusiastic allies. As late as 1986, Stuart H. Loory, onetime Moscow CNN bureau chief, in a letter to the Wall Street Journal (February 3, 1986) wrote:

I can say without reservation that if the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were to submit itself to the kind of free elections held in South Vietnam in the 1960s or El Salvador in the 1980s, it would win an overwhelming mandate. . . . Except for small pockets of resistance to the Communist regime, the people have been truly converted in the past 68 years.

      In his book about the Cold War, Martin Walker, then Washington correspondent of the British daily the Guardian, and earlier its Moscow correspondent, wrote:

The similarities between Moscow in the early 1980s and Washington in the early 1990s became eerily acute to one who had lived through both. The contrast between the former Soviet Union’s release of its prisoners and the way that the USA had over one million of its citizens incarcerated, summoned the bizarre, dismaying thought of an American Gulag. [xii]

      Reading this passage brought up this memory: In 1949, David Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky, Russian émigré social democrats, began publishing articles and finally a book on forced labor in the Soviet Union. During a visit to the Long Island home of a New York Times correspondent covering the United Nations I met the then Times Moscow correspondent. I told them about the Dallin-Nicolaevsky revelations and the map the authors had prepared showing where the concentration camps were located. Both correspondents waved me away with the smug assurance that you shouldn’t take émigré propaganda seriously. Of course, the slave labor story was fully revealed by a UN investigation a few years later and documented by Robert Conquest in The Great Terror, later by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago and most recently by Ann Applebaum’s Gulag based on post-Soviet archives.

      With the accession, following the death of Leonid Brezhnev, of Yuri V. Andropov as the ruling strongman of the Soviet Union, Western press credulity became scandalous. This was the high tide of Durantyism. Andropov, known in Hungary as the Butcher of Budapest for his infamous role during the 1956 Hungarian uprising and a long-time chief of the KGB, instantly became the beneficiary of a disinformation campaign which the American press lapped up with squeals of delight. Andropov was a “bibliophile,” a “connoisseur of modern art,” who enjoyed American novels. The ineffable Washington Post described Andropov as a man

. . . fond of cynical political jokes with an anti-regime twist . . . collects abstract art, likes jazz and Gypsy music [and] has a record of stepping out of his high party official’s cocoon to contact dissidents.

He also swam, played tennis, danced the tango gracefully. Even the Wall Street Journal news pages fell for this disinformation campaign. Andropov, they reported, “likes Glenn Miller records, good scotch whiskey, Oriental rugs, American books.” The New York Times and Time magazine also fell in line which included a revelation that Andropov “had a strange attraction for Western culture.” [xiii] It will be remembered that it was during the Andropov reign that the KAL 007 was shot down. Durantyism never dies. The academic version of Durantyism now reigns in the history departments of American colleges and universities. (For a fully documented report of this scandal see the recently published exposé by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, In Denial).

* * * * *

      Part of the responsibility for the Great Lie era in the journalism from Moscow lies with the academy. One of the great intellectual failures of the century has been the failure by distinguished academics—economists, political scientists, historians, philosophers, sociologists many of them teachers at prestigeous universities—to apply the standards of truth to their research into the Soviet Union and Communism itself.

      As a result of these falsehoods camouflaged as “research,” a fictitious Soviet Union and an equally fictitious People’s Republic of China as utopias-in-being were created for Western policy makers. The relationship between the lies of the academy and the extermination of millions of people within Soviet borders, in Eastern Europe, in China and Southeast Asia may be casual or coincidental but there is no question that Communist totalitarianism benefited from at least fifty years of academic indulgence and willful credulity. As Lionel Trilling once wrote:

This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking and nowadays the errors of academicism do not stay in the academy; they make their way into the world and what begins as a failure of perception among intellectual specialists finds its fulfillment in policy and action.

      There are well-known academic Sovietologists whose scholarly findings published as books or in academic journals, or in their public lectures, were no more objective than editorials in the Soviet press. A towering edifice of untruth about Communism and its two avatars—the USSR and Communist China—was built up by the Sovietology “left” (and later by the Sinology “left”) since the end of World War II.

      Paul Craig Roberts and Karen La Follette in their important book, Meltdown, have described these pro-Soviet and pro-Mao academics as

. . . disillusioned with their own countries, [who] dropped standards of professional objectivity in their portrayal of the Soviet regime.

An indurated academic consensus emerged that Sovietologists, whatever their sub-discipline, ought to avoid critical evaluations of Marxism-Leninism, the command economy, Communism or Stalinism. Use of the word “totalitarian” to describe the USSR or China was regarded as “red-baiting,” a most heinous offense in academe or, at best, unscholarly behavior.

      Never before have so many academics been proven by events and by internal Soviet revelations to have been so abysmally wrong in virtually everything they wrote about the Soviet Union or Marxism-Leninism. Few people are aware of what the majority of these apologist Sovietologists, particularly in the United States, were writing and teaching about the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism when Stalin was at the apogee of his appalling power.

      There were Western academic specialists in Soviet studies who argued that the search for objective truth should be abetted by a charitable “understanding” of the ideology called Marxism-Leninism, and that however pernicious in practice, Marxism-Leninism and its practitioners deserved the benefit of doubt.

      The intellectual fiasco of the Sovietology “left,” who camouflaged their ideology with the robes of academicism, should not be forgotten. Present and future generations should see how the Great Hoax was perpetrated. [xiv]

* * * * *

      To understand how the Great Lie era in American journalism and American intellectualdom occurred I suggest a reading of Eugene Lyons’s book, Assignment in Utopia, especially chapter 6, “To Tell or Not to Tell” and Chapter 15, “The Press Corps Conceals a Famine.” [xv] Lyons had in his early years in Moscow been a self-confessed pro-Soviet partisan. Later he realized what had happened to him. As he writes:

Exaggerated faith in the Soviet experiment had become the intellectual fashion. The more openly the Stalin regime moved away from socialism, the more ardently these latter-day Communists championed the “socialist fatherland.”

Or as he focused more directly on journalism’s deformation professionelle:

Whether in Moscow or Berlin, Tokyo or Rome, all the temptations for the practicing foreign reporter are in the direction of conformity. It is more comfortable and in the long run more profitable to soft-pedal a dispatch for readers thousands of miles away than to face an irate censor and closed official doors (page 582).

* * * * *

      There were correspondents who tried to tell the truth and even had a temporary success. I refer to Malcolm Muggeridge who described Duranty as “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism.” William L. Shirer, however, described him as “the greatest of foreign correspondents to cover Moscow.” [xvi] There was also a witty cynic, A. T. Cholerton, correspondent of the London News-Telegraph in the 1930s. He was accompanying a group of western lawyers who were being shown the courtrooms in which the show trials of the Old Bolsheviks had been staged. “But are their confessions true?” they asked. One inquirer earnestly persisted. Before the Intourist guide could reply. Cholerton interjected: “In Russia, everything is true except the facts.” [xvii]      Ω

Appendix

      To appreciate the meaning of Durantyism I have collected a few extracts from his New York Times dispatches:

There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition, (March 31, 1933), page 13.

Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin’s program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding, (December 9, 1932), page 6.

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, (May 14, 1933), page 18.

      And from Eugene Lyons’s Assignment in Utopia: Duranty told him and Anne O’Hare McCormick, a New York Times foreign affairs columnist, the ghastly story about the famine. “But, Walter, you don’t mean that literally?” Mrs. McCormic, exclaimed. “Hell, I don’t. . . . I’m being conservative,” he replied, adding his famous truism, “But they’re only Russians,” (page 580).