Mark von Hagen, a leading light of Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian history and scholarship in America, died last week in Tempe, Arizona, at the age of 65. Professor emeritus of history at Arizona State, von Hagen had spent the bulk of his career at Columbia where, in 1985, he joined the history faculty after earning a Stanford doctorate and was, among other things, director of Columbia’s Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
Yet one of von Hagen’s most significant, and surely his most unusual, achievements had to do with a journalist: Walter Duranty.
Von Hagen specialized in Slavic studies and, especially, the innumerable nationalities who populated the old Soviet empire. He was also a mainstay of scholarly associations and, in the genuine sense of the term, a public intellectual: A tireless promoter of human rights, student of civil-military relations, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was also a character of sorts. One colleague remembered him “roaming the halls of the Harriman Institute for hours, masterfully playing the accordion during our annual Christmas parties.”
With all that in mind, in 2003, the New York Times commissioned von Hagen to undertake a delicate assignment: To review the reporting of the Times‘ onetime Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty (1884-1957), who had arrived in Russia shortly after the Revolution, didn’t depart from Moscow until 1934, and continued as a special Times correspondent on Soviet affairs until World War II.
Duranty had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his reporting from Moscow, and von Hagen’s brief was to judge whether, as critics had long maintained, Duranty was not an objective journalist but an enthusiast for the Soviet “experiment” and beneficiary of favored treatment from the Kremlin for his favorable accounts of Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship. Duranty’s Pulitzer had been awarded in the midst of the Soviet drive to collectivize agriculture that resulted in the deliberate death by starvation of millions of Ukrainians. (The exact number is still a matter of debate but most estimates range between 5 and 10 million.)
To be sure, the foreign press was largely forbidden to investigate rumors of the famine and genocide now referred to as the Holodomor, Ukrainian for “to kill by starvation.” But two British correspondents based in Moscow, Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian, and the American journalist William Henry Chamberlain of the Christian Science Monitor, did manage to travel in the Ukrainian countryside and report on their findings from outside the Soviet Union.
This appears to have enraged Duranty who, while acknowledging the severity of Stalin’s methods, denied accusations of famine and blamed Jones’s reporting, in particular, on diplomatic conflicts between the Kremlin and the British government. In a March 1933 story with a headline both comic and cruel (“Russians Hungry, But Not Starving”) Duranty complained about British sources for “a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union” and assured Times readers that “any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”
Duranty’s authority as the veteran Times correspondent in the Soviet capital, and his recent Pulitzer Prize, served to settle the matter for, among others, the editors of The Nation, who praised his reporting as “the most enlightened, dispassionate dispatches from a great nation in the making which appeared in any newspaper in the world.” And there the matter stood until recent decades.
To its credit, the Times didn’t flinch when, three-quarters of a century later, Mark von Hagen concluded that Walter Duranty had effectively fallen “under Stalin’s spell” during his tenure in Moscow and, in suitably dispassionate language, condemned Duranty’s “uncritical acceptance of the Soviet self-justification for its cruel and wasteful regime.”
In a subsequent interview, von Hagen expressed his opinion that, “for the sake of The New York Times‘ honor, they should take the [Pulitzer] Prize away” and that Duranty’s award “diminishes the Prize’s honor.” In a curious postscript, however, the Pulitzer board declined to revoke it. “There was not clear and convincing evidence,” explained Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler, “of deliberate deception.”
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at The Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
