The U.S. Ukrainian community organized the campaign against the journalist. In particular, Miron Kurolas, a member of the Ukrainian National Association, printed a thousand cards on Ukrainian Famine and sent it out to American institutions. Ukrainian Congress Committee of America distributed a huge circulation of a statement regarding Duranty’s false materials. In them, the journalist hid the truth of the oppressed state of the Soviet people and sympathized with the Kremlin.
In 1932-1933, the Times, the New York Times, Figaro, La Stampa, Zurich Zeitung, Gazette de Lausanne told of the mass famine in Ukraine, Povolzhye and Northern Caucasus. Correspondents of these publications in the USSR tried to be truthful in their depiction of the events. However, soon some of them started to censor the information to please the Kremlin. Bureaucrats and special agents were pressuring the journalists. They threatened to revoke their visas and deny their entry into a number of cities and regions of the USSR. In 1993, journalists were not allowed into Ukraine. Nevertheless, there are honest publications by M. Muggeridge, V. Chamberlain, U. Lions from which the West learned of the horrors of the famine.
However, Walter Duranty working as the New York Times’ correspondent in Moscow openly declared that there was no famine in Ukraine and other wheat-growing regions. “Any report of a famine is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” – wrote Duranty in the August 24, 1933 issue of the New York Times. According to him, the Soviet Union exports grain and refuses humanitarian aid. And this means that the situation in the USSR is quite successful. Soviet people die of unknown diseases and dry climate. Nobel Laureate English writer Bernard Shaw, ex-prime-minister of France Edouard Herriot, and other friends of Bolsheviks shared this opinion of the journalist.
Walter Duranty worked as a correspondent in the USSR in 1921-1934. He died in 1957 at the age of 73.
In 1932, Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. It was awarded to him for his reports from the USSR and their “scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity.” Now the Pulitzer Board has a difficult problem to solve. Duranty got his prize for reports written in 1931. The reports talked of Stalin’s Five Year Plan. The journalist sympathized with the Bolshevik’s economic experiment. In 1932-1933, as a Pulitzer Prize winner he used his authority to justify genocide and tyranny. Although, he admitted privately to William Strang, a staff member of the British Embassy in Moscow, that "it is quite possible that as many as ten million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past 10 years". These words however do not rehabilitate the journalist in the eyes of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. For it, Duranty will always remain a Stalinist apologist.