Walter Duranty (25 May 1884 – 3 October 1957) was an Anglo-American journalist who served as Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times for fourteen years (1922–1936) following the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1917–1923).

After the advent of the first five-year plan (1928–1933), which aimed to transform Soviet industry and agriculture, however, he was granted an exclusive interview with Joseph Stalin that greatly enhanced his reputation as a journalist.

[9] In the 1931 series of reports for which he received the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence, Duranty argued that the Russian people were "Asiatic" in thought, valuing communal effort and requiring autocratic government.

[citation needed] Failed attempts since the time of Peter the Great to apply Western ideals in Russia were a form of European colonialism, he wrote, that had been finally swept away by the 1917 Revolution.

[11] Duranty argued that the Soviet Union's mentality in 1931 greatly differed from the perception created by the ideas of Karl Marx;[12][vague] he viewed Stalinism as an integration of Marxism with Leninism.

[17] In The New York Times on 31 March 1933, Walter Duranty denounced reports of famine and, in particular, he attacked Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who had witnessed the starving in Ukraine and issued a widely published press release about their plight two days earlier in Berlin.

)[18] Under the title "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving", Duranty's article described the situation 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".The "diplomatic duel" was a reference to the arrest of engineers from the Metropolitan-Vickers company who were working in the USSR.

Accused with Soviet citizens of "wrecking" (sabotaging) the plant they were building, they were the subjects of one in a series of show trials presided over by Andrey Vyshinsky[19] during the First Five Year Plan.

"[21] Following sensitive negotiations in November 1933 that resulted in the establishment of relations between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., a dinner was given for Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov in New York City's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

"[21] Sally J. Taylor, author of the critical Duranty biography Stalin's Apologist, argues that his reporting from the USSR was a key factor in U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1933 decision to grant official recognition to the Soviet Union.

Some drew a contrast with the capitalist world, going through the Great Depression; others wrote out of a genuine belief in Communism; some acted out of fear of being expelled from Moscow, which would result in a loss of livelihood.

[24] The major controversy regarding his work remains his reporting on the great famine of 1930–33 that struck certain parts of the USSR after agriculture was forcibly and rapidly "collectivised".

In his memoirs, British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, then The Manchester Guardian's correspondent in Moscow, talked of Duranty's "persistent lying"[27] and elsewhere called him "the greatest liar I ever knew".

[29] Both British intelligence[30] and American engineer Zara Witkin, who worked in the USSR from 1932 to 1934,[31] confirmed that Duranty knowingly misrepresented information about the nature and scale of the famine.

[33] He admits that people starved, including not just "class enemies" but also loyal communists,[33] but he says that Stalin was forced to order the requisitions to equip the Red Army enough to deter an imminent Japanese invasion[33] (a reprise of the Siberian Intervention of a decade earlier)—in other words, to save the Soviet Union from impending military doom, not because Stalin wanted to collectivize the population at gunpoint, on pain of death.

Controversy and concern over Duranty's reporting on the famine in Soviet Ukraine led to a move to posthumously and symbolically strip him of the Pulitzer Prize he received in 1932.

[34][35] Four years earlier, in a 1986 New York Times review of Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), former Moscow bureau reporter Craig Whitney wrote that Duranty effectively ignored the famine until it was almost over.

[36] In 2003, following an international campaign by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Pulitzer Board began a renewed inquiry, and The New York Times hired Mark von Hagen, a professor of Russian history at Columbia University, to review Duranty's work as a whole.

[38] In a letter accompanying the report, The New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. called Duranty's work "slovenly" and said it "should have been recognized for what it was by his editors and by his Pulitzer judges seven decades ago.

In a 21 November 2003 press release, he stated that, with regard to the 13 articles by Duranty from 1931 submitted for the award, "there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case.

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller publicly expressed remorse that he did not do more to return the award in 2003, saying, "A Pulitzer Prize is not just an accolade for an isolated piece of work.