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     The New York Times was an apologist for Stalin's criminal
     regime. (Gray New York Times Book Review 6/24/90)

<doctype>book review
<author>Gray, Francine Du Plessix
<title>The Journalist and the Dictator
<serial>The New York Times Book Review
<date>June 24, 1990
<pages>3

<book author>Taylor, S.J.
<book title>Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York
Times's Man in Moscow
<book city>New York
<book publisher>Oxford University Press
<book year>1990

<excerpt>

     In his adulatory perspective, which led some to brand The
     New York Times the "Uptown Daily Worker" (and caused
     consternation among many of The Times's editors), such
     fascistic measures as the imposition of internal passports
     were praised by Duranty as essential "to purge [cities] of
     undesirable elements"; the verdicts of the show trials of
     1928 were accepted by the prosperous capitalist Duranty as
     gospel truths; the resulting executions were seen as
     purgatory measures essential to the success of the Communist
     Millennium. "You can't make an omelette without breaking
     eggs" was Duranty's catchall phrase for the Soviet state's
     murderous excesses. Even more repugnant was his complicity
     in covering up one of the vastest mass murders in human
     history: the millions of lives destroyed in the early 1930's
     during Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture, and
     his extermination of the kulak class through wholesale
     slaughter and state-imposed starvation. These are tragedies
     that Duranty dismissed for over a year, without even
     bothering to glean any firsthand evidence, as mere rumors,
     insisting that "the 'famine' is mostly bunk."

     .... Beset by the Great Depression and by mounting fears of
     the Nazi threat, the West was almost equally reluctant to
     accept any criticism of the Stalinist March to Progress. The
     author cites the slander and vilification that met Malcolm
     Muggeridge when he published his wholly truthful dispatches
     in The Guardian (he "couldn't get work" for years to come,
     he told Ms. Taylor a half-century later). Mr. Muggeridge
     documented not only widespread famine but also cannibalism,
     the mass execution of innocents, "a state of war, a military
     occupation."

     But Ms. Taylor presents equally ample material on Duranty's
     outrageous coverage of these atrocities. She compares the
     reluctant admissions of scarcity he published in The New
     York Times after his first belated eyewitness tour of the
     Ukraine in the fall of 1933 to a confidential spoken report
     he gave to the British Embassy within days of his return to
     Moscow. In that covert account--which evidences his
     penetrating insight, the magnitude of the talent he
     wasted--Duranty declared that "the Ukraine had been bled
     white," and ventured that "as many as 10 million" may have
     died of starvation. It was the highest estimate given to
     date of the fatalities caused by Stalin's enforced famine--a
     figure approximated only in recent years by such
     irreproachable scholars as Robert Conquest and by
     glasnost-era Soviet historians themselves.

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