Some world events, such as the violence now happening in Ukraine, are of such gravity as to seem to demand our total attention. That at least is how I feel as I sit down to write my weekly essay. It would be nearly irreverent to talk about anything else. At the same time, I am keenly aware that I cannot possibly have anything useful to say. Most people want to see themselves as original thinkers; but when it comes to fast paced and rapidly changing events in distant parts of the world of which we are ignorant, what possibly useful independent thoughts can we claim? It does seem obvious on the face of it that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is terrible, unjustified, murderous. Furthermore, given the nature of the governance system in Russia, it seems justifiable to place most of the blame for the crime—if not all of it—on Russia’s despotic leader, Vladimir Putin. At least, that has emerged as the “Western” and especially the American consensus. This view is held with such confidence that the authorities of the Metropolitan Opera feel justified in suspending a Russian opera star who, though she in fact condemned his war, was unwilling to submit to the compelled speech act of a plenary denunciation of Putin. “‘It is a great artistic loss for the Met and for opera,’ Met General Manager Peter Gelb said in a statement Thursday. ‘Anna [Netrebko] is one of the greatest singers in Met history, but with Putin killing innocent victims in Ukraine, there was no way forward’.” One possible way forward might be for Mr. Gelb to read Max Eastman’s Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism (New York: Knopf, 1934), a classic account of the dismal effects of compulsory Soviet “correct thought” as imposed on the artistic life of a large nation. We do not need cultural commissars in this country, nor can we defend democratic values in Ukraine by trashing of the Bill of Rights in the Lincoln Center. I witnessed a more appropriate initiative by the musical establishment on Sunday afternoon at another concert of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra. Before proceeding to the second half of the concert, which was Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite,” the maestro invited the audience to stand for the playing of a short and unfamiliar piece not listed on the program: the Ukrainian national anthem, a noble composition that was greeted by the audience with enthusiasm.
But one battle at a time. The horrors of Putin’s war are real enough, even if everything we (or at least I) know of them has come from news reports of varying authority. For me that means principally the extensive coverage to be found each day in the New York Times, and the (partially) eye-witness accounts on offer each evening in lengthy segments of the PBS News Hour. Such “mainstream” news outlets have many small tributaries in social media platforms. Indeed presentation of the news has over recent years itself surreptitiously become part of the news, and there is frequent reference in it to the importance and debatable import of an avalanche of private cell phone photographs and Tiktok and cell phone videos in which the virtual world is now buried. There is good news and bad news in the technological developments that allow anyone on the spot with a phone to be a reporter. You often have to take it on faith that the the photograph of the bombed-out building you see was actually taken in Ukraine rather than in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Western nations will not send their troops to fight in the hot war of bombs and bullets, but they have a chance of winning the information war. Truth is still war’s first casualty. According to reports many Russians, perhaps even most of them, have been so successfully disinformed by their government clique that they believe there is no “war” in Ukraine, only a police action to mop up “Nazis”. But Mr. Putin’s efforts at obfuscation have been considerably frustrated already by the clever tactic of American intelligence agencies, which have been publicly predicting with awesome accuracy the actual course of his aggression. And it appears that the energetic coverage offered by the Times is in part an unadvertised act of reparation for a nearly century-old journalistic crime of its own.
As I discovered when I was writing about the Ukrainian whistleblower Viktor Kravchenko in The Anti-Communist Manifestos, the Soviet history of Ukraine is among the most tragic in an anthology of national tragedies. Having spent the later 1920s concentrating mainly on the hammer, Stalin was by the early 1930s ready to turn his full attention to the sickle. He set out on a disastrous program of agricultural collectivization. Ukraine, the “bread-basket of the Soviet Union,” got his special attention. He was particularly determined to rid the land of the kulaks, the successful and mildly entrepreneurial smallholders who were the backbone of the region’s comparative agricultural prosperity. In the Soviet leaders’ Marxist view, and in their rhetoric, these family farmers were a “class” of exploiters and “parasites”, roughly equivalent to the American Robber Barons. Stalin, as ever, was prepared to use extreme measures. The Russian cities needed grain, and Ukrainian peasants had some. Armed Communist gangs were sent through the villages to confiscate it. Very often they plundered any personal and household movables they could carry as well. In 1932 and 1933, in what Ukrainians call the Holodomor (roughly “Terror Famine”) millions died. The precise number is disputed, as is also the question of the precise degree to which the famine was chiefly the result of conscious punitive policy as opposed to gross bureaucratic incompetence. Both were certainly involved. Some have questioned the view of the anti-Communist historian Robert Conquest in his book Harvest of Sorrow that it was an intentional genocide specifically directed against Ukrainian identity, but that is in effect a political quibble. The Ukrainian famine was a horrendous disaster of huge dimensions largely engineered by a regime at war against its own people. But what did Times readers know of it? The answer is: nothing. They did know about the production numbers claimed by the Politburo for the Five Year Plan. They did know all about the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, in which more than a hundred people lost their lives.
The Times’s long-serving bureau chief in Moscow—their man on the spot virtually since the revolution—was an Anglo-American fellow-traveler named Walter Duranty. His attitude toward the inevitable episodes of unpleasantness characteristic of police states was summed up in a pithy saw: you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. The omelet, of course, was the utopian socialism even then being cooked up by the Red Czar. Duranty was one of the most famous foreign correspondents in Russia, probably the most famous. His journalistic practice was summed up in one of his book titles: I Write As I Please. For my research I had to read not merely his books but several about him, one of which is a very funny contemporary novel (Winter in Moscow, 1934) by Malcolm Muggeridge. More straight-forward is S. J. Taylor’s Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man in Moscow, though I might argue with the subtitle. “Stalin’s Man at the New York Times” might be more accurate.
I am not an advocate for the periodic attempts to strip Duranty of his Pulitzer Prize posthumously. If you believe as I do that facing up to history does not require erasing it, various forms of currently fashionable iconoclasm have little appeal. And having led in the creation of a nuclear world, America must be wary of that world’s constraints. But there is a difference between a no-fly zone and a no-lie zone. The Western press has a great opportunity, and I think also a responsibility to demonstrate the effectiveness of the power of truth-telling and free expression in the course of world affairs. So far it seems to be doing an excellent job, with the Times leading the way. Let the pen be mightier than the sword.
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