How Liberal Journalism Turned a Blind Eye to Stalin’s Blood and Faminehttps://pjmedia.com/david-manney/2025/08/18/how-liberal-journalism-turned-a-blind-eye-to-stalins-blood-and-famine-n4942823Tomorrow marks the anniversary of Stalin’s Great Purge, a time when the Soviet Union became a factory of death. For three years, Uncle Joe unleashed terror on his own people. Men loyal to the cause were tortured, even though they helped build the revolution. Overnight, families disappeared into an abyss created by the NKVD. A firing squad executed the lucky ones. The unlucky ones? They met their fates in the Gulags.
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Stalin's purge wasn't intended to eliminate his enemies; instead, it created a society built on fear and characterized by living in silence. Children learned to denounce their parents because every voice shook with fear over the possibility of accusation. Coworkers spied on each other across factory floors, culminating in a climate where Soviet citizens lived in a climate of suspicion, which was their way of surviving.
The absolute power Stalin achieved wasn't achieved only by killing rivals. The key? That was the complete blanket of fear, permeating throughout their society.
The Convenient Lies of Walter Duranty
Right when Stalin started turning his people into dust, people across the globe should've been stunned at such brutality. The West should've had people on the ground, reporting on the atrocities. They did, and remember their leader? The Pulitzer Prize-winning Walter Duranty of the New York Times.
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Reporters like Gareth Jones, who braved the Ukrainian countryside, witnessed villages hollowed out by overwhelming hunger. As millions were dying in the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine, readers of Duranty were reassured that everything was good, or at least manageable. These dispatches out of Moscow earned him his prize, along with the stench that hangs over most of the journalism profession to this day.
He was the first of many reporters to win that esteemed prize because of lies.
The man knew; internal memos and private conversations revealed that Duranty was aware of the extent of the famine, yet he chose to conceal it. Why? Access. He believed access mattered more than the truth, and that Soviet brutality was justified in the pursuit of progress.
The NYT still refuses to return the Pulitzer Prize earned by lying about, ignoring, and excusing spilt Ukrainian, Russian, and Central Asian ethnic minorities' blood. Among the dead 10s of millions are my paternal grandmother's brothers.
