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S. J. Taylor

Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow Hardcover – March 29, 1990

by S.J. Taylor (Author)

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Short, unattractive, hobbling about Stalin's Moscow on a wooden leg, Walter Duranty was an unlikely candidate for the world's most famous foreign correspondent. Yet for almost twenty years his articles filled the front page of The New York Times with gripping coverage of the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. A witty, engaging, impish character with a flamboyant life-style, he was a Pulitzer Prize winner, the individual most credited with helping to win U.S. recognition for the Soviet regime, and the reporter who had predicted the success of the Bolshevik state when all others claimed it was doomed. But, as S.J. Taylor reveals in this provocative biography, Walter Duranty played a key role in perpetrating some of the greatest lies history has ever known.
Stalin's Apologist deftly unfolds the story of this accomplished but sordid and tragic life. Drawing on sources ranging from newspapers to private letters and journals to interviews with such figures as William Shirer and W. Averell Harriman, Taylor's vivid narrative unveils a figure driven by ambition, whose early success reporting on Bolshevik Russia--he was foremost in predicting Stalin's rise to power--established his international reputation, fed his overconfident contempt for his colleagues, and indeed led him to identify with the Soviet dictator. Thus during the great Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s, which Stalin engineered to crush millions of peasants who resisted his policies, Duranty dismissed other correspondents' reports of mass starvation and, though secretly aware of the full scale of the horror, effectively reinforced the official cover-up of one of history's greatest man-made disasters. Later, he took the rigged show trials of Stalin's Great Purges at face value, blithely accepting the guilt of the victims. He believed himself the leading expert on the Soviet Union, and his faith in his own insight drew him into a downward spiral of distortions and untruths, typified by his memorable excuse for Stalin's crimes, "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
Taylor brilliantly captures the full range of Duranty's astonishing life, from his participation in the Satanic orgies of Aleister ("the Beast") Crowley, to his dramatic front-line reporting during World War I, to his epic womanizing and heavy drug and alcohol abuse. It is the bitter, ironic story of a man who had the rare opportunity to bring to light the suffering of the millions of Stalin's victims, but remained a prisoner of vanity, self-indulgence, and success.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A beautifully researched life of the high-living, cynical journalist who helped cover up Stalin's atrocities in the 1930s" --New York Times Book Review.

About the Author

About the Author:
S.J. Taylor is a writer living in London.

Product details

ASIN : 0195057007
Publisher : Oxford University Press; 1st edition (March 29, 1990)
Language : English
Hardcover : 432 pages
ISBN-10 : 9780195057003
ISBN-13 : 978-0195057003
Item Weight : 1.85 pounds
Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,140,153 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #621 in Mid Atlantic U.S. Biographies
- #2,143 in Journalist Biographies

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32 ratings

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A. Case

An important Book

Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2019

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"Fake News" is nothing new. Read about The New York Times' chief foreign correspondent, Walter Duranty, and his reporting on the wonders of Stalin's workers' paradise. When not worshiping Satan with his pal Alistair Crowley the Time's chief foreign correspondent was witnessing hundreds of thousands of innocent farmers being packed off to death camps. Of course he did not report any of this. Watching families being transporter to slow death The Time's man on the spot merely dismissed them as "victims of the march to progress." Now I would not want to give progressives a bad name, but in Anglo-American Jurisprudence assisting the cover up of a murder makes you an accomplice. So its really no stretch to state that the NYT was an accomplice to mass murder. To this day, the Ukrainian Government holds this view of the Grey Lady. Even setting the revelations of gross ideological bias aside, this book is a window into the culture of the drunken, lazy, inept, fumbling dilettantes who far to many rely on as professional truth gathers. At the very least, this book should leave the reader with a healthy skepticism regarding journalists in general and the quality of the information they disseminate.

20 people found this helpful

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Loves Labs

The Truth About the New York Times

Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2020

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Durant won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Ukraine. He lied while millions died of starvation. The Times had the opportunity to give it back, and didn’t. This is an important book on why the Times still can not be trusted. Durant was a horrible human being who didn’t care when innocent people died so that he could have a fancy apartment in Moscow. Some things never change.

4 people found this helpful

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Rostislav

Moscow adventures of Mr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2014

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I'd like to thank the worthy author for her excellent research, which results in a very detailed portrait of her hero, while leaving enough space for readers' own conclusions and impressions. My own impression is that Duranty, being an undoubtedly gifted man (or rather gifted "superman", who, to judge from some contemporaries' opinions, never cared about any "lower beings" around him), found his ideal in Stalin. Soviet leader was as gifted and as inhuman – he never cared about Duranty as well, especially after the journalist ceased to be useful for his stratagems.
During the sixties, as a University student, I happened to know one of Duranty's heirs in the NYT Moscow bureau. It was Mr. Seymour Topping - by the way, years later he became the Pulitzer Committee chief. Thanks to this stealthy and adventurous acquaintance (ah, my last-moment escapes from KGB surveillance, our silent writings of quick notes in his bugged apartment etc!) my home was enriched by many wonderful books, and I was enriched by the general picture of a Western correspondent's work behind the Iron Curtain. They could print their real feelings no more than we could – that is, it was possible theoretically, but with a practical cross on their next visa into the USSR. Hence, their editors-in-chiefs, even if they weren't exactly pro-Kremlin, never supported honest reporting from Russia: first, it was too troublesome in purely bureaucratic sense (frequent personnel changes), second, it was too disharmonic in the sense of the ever-fashionable "peaceful coexistence". Some able correspondents were producing genuine masterpieces of Aesopian language, others were just storing their experiences to be printed later in a book form, after leaving Moscow forever.
As I now understand, Mr. Topping was probably left-leaning in his world-view, but nevertheless, I remember him as a sincere, shrewd and extremely hard-working journalist, always attentive even to my naïve opinions. He was never condescending, never full of some secret knowledge, never super-manish, – in other words, he wasn't Mr. Duranty at all. That's why I was happy to hear Seymour's voice again during my last US visit some fifty years later. I am not so sure about Duranty's company: be they Russians or Westerners, they would be hardly eager to meet him again in this century…
For me this thrilling book is a timely reincarnation of Mr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story, clearly showing how powerful the magnet of Communism is for the accelerated transformation of any power-attracted Jekyll into a horrible Hyde. If Duranty would stay in the West, his Hyde qualities would be probably limited to his close circle only, but Stalin gifted him a unique chance to feel himself a majestic hedonist guru amidst the huge death camp – and that was a sure end for Jekyll. I'd like to compare Mrs. Taylor's work with a possibility to look through a crystal-clear window into our world's recent past, into Stalin's vile utopia and, the main thing, into a dark process of the popular myths' birth.
Very grateful Rostislav, Saint-Petersburg, Russia.

11 people found this helpful

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jtq

A truly amazing book

Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2014

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This very well researched, very well written, and very present-day relevant book deserves five stars, but there are some points to be made about it.

The author fails to frame clearly Duranty's worst sins, but shows her contempt is off-handed asides. She also tells some stories in confusing temporal context. She does a good job of showing the international support for Stalin and socialism.

I end up actually feeling sympathy for Duranty. Half of his contemporary intellectual world was yearning for socialism (as today) to tell the world what to do by its vain, Godless brilliance. Duranty got himself caught in a spotlight and became a whipping boy to carry the guilt that many deserved.

In covering for failing socialism, is he not sustained by the Paul Krugmans and Obamaphilic media of today?

14 people found this helpful

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Big Guy

Brilliant

Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2013

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Well researched and beautifully written story of a Pulitzer-winning liar. He covered up a mass extermination of people greater than the holocaust from the world. Hopefully, this superb book will give this story will get the exposure it demands. Remarkably, the New York Times refuses to return the award.

20 people found this helpful

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Amex

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2018

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like the modern liberal

5 people found this helpful

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Sean Brady

Shocking

Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2013

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I always wondered why the New York Times remains sheepish about condemning Stalin's various purges and mass murders. This book explains that and more.

15 people found this helpful

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Steve

Stalin and The NewYork Times

Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2013

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This should be required reading for people who think they can believe what they read in The New York Times. Duranty should have been sent down to the basement of the Lubyanka and left there, along with his lying cheating bosses and fellow traveler friends in the Roosevelt administration. It is important to remember that journalism is just as honest now as it was back then.

23 people found this helpful

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P. Scrivener

Believing your own press

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 18, 2011

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The product description of this book is misleading. Duranty was not a working class socialist, but a product of the industrial middle classes in Liverpool. He attended Harrow Public School, although withdrawn later when his family fell on harder times, still attending a good school, where he was part of the rowing team. He subsequently went to Cambridge. It is hard to credit now how influential Duranty was as a journalist for the New York Times. Having pestered his way into a job for the paper in Paris, his personalised pieces on the horrors of trench warfare, gained a wide audience in America and led to him reporting from Riga and eventually Moscow. He seems to have been liked for his gregariousness wit and readiness with the bottle, and made friends and admirers easily. Women were drawn to his charm, even though his relations with them, were for him at least largely sexual. He was married to Jane Cheron, the rather bizarre opium addicted muse of Aleister Crowley, with whom he also dabbled in the 'black arts' before WW1, much to his later embarassment. His subsequent relationship with his Russian housekeeper/mistress Katya and the birth of a son Michael, brought out little in the way of responsibility. He abandoned both without much qualm.

Duranty undoubtedly wrote some very good pieces for NYT, and his sympathies, not overtly political, stemmed from his view that the soviets had a lot of ground to make up to industrialise a backward country and in his favourite phrase, You don't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Having established his credentials as a jouralist and Russia expert, his influence certainly contributed to the US recognising the USSR, although it is difficult to say how much. The fact that he was awared a Pulitzer prize added to his lustre. Duranty was liked and disliked by his journalistic colleagues in fairly equal number. Some of this was certainly professional jealousy. But others such as Malcolm Muggeridge thought him an unprincipled liar. This, particularly in relation to his under reporting of the famines in the Ukraine resulting from collectivisation and the later show trials. He had painted himself into a corner and arrogance, vanity and not a little contempt for others ability held him there. His sympathy for Stalin, who rewarded him for his part in US recognition with a personal interview in 1929, fails my understanding.

In some ways this book was published at just the wrong time 1990. The opening up of soviet archives following 1989 would undoubtedly have brought whole reams of new material, that could have added much to the story. However, this is no criticism of Sally Taylor. I assume she Used S J, because female historians on heavier subjects, might have been taken less seriously. The writing is fluid and rattles along at a great pace. She fits Duranty well into his surroundings, and is also excellent at describing his relationships, personal friendships and professional rivalries.

The last part of the book dealing with his decline, near penury and constant cadging for money, adds little to our understanding of his Russian views. It does round out his story, and also show that even then he had friends, and in his second wife Anna Enwright, a woman who stood by him to the end. They married on his deathbed.

It would be easy to descibe Duranty as a sociopath, he certainly displayed some of those tendencies. But it is hard to pin him down, although Sally Taylor has a very good go at trying. Well worth reading.

7 people found this helpful

arturdoigtpoisson

Old Harrovian and Stalin

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 30, 2018

Verified Purchase

Informative and scrupulous

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