The topic of Mr. Duranty is a very difficult one for me at best. My family background is Ukrainian, and my great grandmother starved to death because of the Holodomor. It was a horrific time frame. Most of our extended family my grandmother's siblings we have no idea what happened to them. My grandfather is buried in a mass grave somewhere near Vinnytsia.

Walter Duranty was a British journalist who won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for a series of 5 stories written as the correspondent for the New York Times in Moscow. These stories covered Stalin's Five Year Plan to industrialize the Soviet Union. Part of that plan was to collectivize farming, to which the majority of Ukrainians were opposed.

He described those who opposed collectivization of farming as an "almost privileged class" that had been created by mistake by Lenin. He said that the same logic that led to the overthrow of the Czarist regime must inevitably lead to the destruction of these people, whom he numbered at 5,000,000.

He said that these people had to be "liquidated or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian mass". Duranty claimed that the Siberian labor camps were a means of giving individuals a chance to rejoin Soviet society but also said that for those who could not accept the system, "the final fate of such enemies is death.".

On March 31, 1933, Walter Duranty denounced the famine stories in the New York Times. In the piece, he described the situation under the title "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving" as follows: "In the middle of the diplomatic duel between Great Britain and the Soviet Union over the accused British engineers, there appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with 'thousands already dead and millions menaced by death from starvation."

Contradicting what he had written in the New York Times, on September 26, 1933 in a private conversation with British Diplomat William Strang, Duranty said, "it is quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year."

Walter Duranty mislead the world by writing deliberate falsehoods about the Holodomor, which has been decreed an act of genocide by the Verkhovna Rada Ukrajiny.

It is time in my opinion that this historical event be made right by revoking the Pulitzer Prize awarded to this man.

Sources:

Holodomor Wiki

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