Stalin’s Apologist by S.J. Taylor

Description

The most shameful story in journalism history. S.J. Taylor’s Stalin’s Apologist tells of Walter Duranty: the New York Times Moscow correspondent who won a Pulitzer while covering up Stalin’s terror-famine in Ukraine — the man who wrote that there was ‘no famine’ while millions starved, all to keep his access and his legend.

Taylor’s investigation is meticulous and damning: Duranty’s access, his lies, the Times’s decades of evasion and the long campaign to revoke the prize. It is a book about truth and power — how the need for a story can corrupt the telling, and how great institutions protect their own mistakes.

Chilling, important, and superbly researched. For journalism and history readers: the cautionary tale of the century. You will never trust a dateline quite the same way. Taylor’s book remains the essential account of a shameful episode: journalism’s original sin, investigated without mercy. Every reporter should read it; every reader should know it.

Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man in Moscow is S. J. Taylor’s provocative 1990 biography of one of journalism’s most notorious figures. Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s Moscow correspondent from 1922, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his reporting on the Soviet Union — yet lived in luxury while millions starved, and used his prestige to deny the Ukrainian famine (Holodomor) of 1932–33.
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nTaylor traces Duranty’s rise from an obscure Liverpool-born reporter to the most famous foreign correspondent of his age, revealing how he became, in effect, Stalin’s apologist: filing dispatches that whitewashed purges, show trials, and famine, while enjoying the Kremlin’s favors. Drawing on extensive research, Taylor exposes the machinery of deception — and the cost of silence.
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nA gripping account of power, propaganda, and journalistic failure, Stalin’s Apologist remains essential reading for students of history, journalism, and Soviet studies — a cautionary tale about what happens when a reporter chooses access over truth.