Walter Duranty
- Walter Duranty, The New York Times, “Trade Equilibrium is New Soviet Goal”, 20 June 1931
- “belt-tightening”
- “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”
- https://twitter.com/BadBalticTakes/status/1729098670887309385 I read all 13 of Walter Duranty’s articles for which he was awarded the Pulitzer.
My god. It is absolute drivel.
I mean, I knew he was a lying piece of shit but I didn’t realise he was such a bore too. I thought he could at least semi-plausibly pose as a decent journalist before he went all in on genocide denialism.
But, in his Pulitzer-winning articles, he waffles about abstract history and racial pseudoscience, just totally detached from the reality of the soviet union he was getting praise for supposedly understanding.
His award-winning articles included shit like: ‘Stalinism Solving Minorities Problem’ and ‘Red Army is Held No Menace to Peace’.
Ok, I know I’m about 92 years late, but I think it’s so useful to understand Duranty in order to understand the patterns of disinformation today.
Because Duranty’s work is so bad in ways that are SO similar to so many “russia experts” and former moscow correspondents today.
Duranty doesn’t try to convert people into supporters of stalin or russia but he presents himself as neutral while selling stalinism and the soviet union in ways that Western audiences will accept and want to do business with, while downplaying concerns for human rights or aggression.
Most hilariously, he whines in his Pulitzer-winning articles about how “infuriating” it is that people think moscow correspondents just write what the kremlin tells them to write - and then Duranty attacks journalists in “centres of anti-Soviet information” like the Baltic countries.
“So great is the influence abroad of the Soviet censorship myth and the myth of bought or terrorized foreign correspondents in Moscow that the most monstrous inanities from these border States gain ready credence.”
He sounds EXACTLY like today’s moscow correspondents and “russia experts”!
And just like them, he staked his reputation on terrible analysis:
“As to the true purpose of the Red Army and the whole gigantic scheme of military preparation, your correspondent is prepared to stake his reputation on the fact that at present it is purely defensive, and for all he can see now will be so in the future. Europe’s nightmares of a “Red horde” sweeping forward to world conquest are, in this correspondents opinion, either anti-Soviet propaganda tout court or atavistic bogies of Attila, Tamerlane and the Turks. Previous dispatches have shown, or tried to show, how “self-contained” Stalinism is and how thoroughly it has adopted Voltaire’s advice to “cultivate your own garden.””
And some of it is absolute cringe too:
“…there is the ever-driving energy of the Communist party, from graybeards to children, which the Kremlin radiates to the remotest edge of the U. S. S. R. like a current that makes all molecule cohere. To say that this process. Is fully accomplished is premature, but there is small doubt that Stalinism has already achieved a marked degree of transmutation of petty nationalism into a great Pan-Sovietism—not aggressive, not, the writer firmly believes, “Red imperialism” aroused for world conquest, but strong and potent dangerous should attack from without provoke it to reprisal.”
Remember, this was the stuff he built his reputation on and which earned him the Pulitzer, not the later outright genocide denialism that he spent that credibility on.
In future tweets, I will bring more direct comparisons of Walter Duranty style analysis among today’s “russia experts”.
Of course, the Pulitzer can’t be revoked all these years later just because his writing and analysis was terrible.
But it stretches credibility to claim he only because a russian asset immediately after all this drivel. And it is naive not to realise that the Pulitzer armed him with the credibility that he would use to help cover-up and enable the genocide.
