Walter Duranty

Walter Duranty
Duranty (lower center) with other war correspondents, 1919.
Born	Walter Duranty (1884-05-25)25 May 1884 Liverpool, England
Died	3 October 1957(1957-10-03) (aged 73) Orlando, Florida, U.S.
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Occupation	Journalist, propagandist

Walter Duranty (May 25, 1884 – October 3, 1957) was a Liverpool-born, Anglo-American journalist who served as the Moscow Bureau Chief of The New York Times for fourteen years (1922–1936) following the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–1921).

In 1932 Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize for a series of reports about the Soviet Union, 11 of them published in June 1931. He was criticized then and later for his denial of widespread famine (1932–33) in the USSR, most particularly the mass starvation in Ukraine. Years later, there were calls to revoke his Pulitzer; The New York Times, which submitted his work for the prize in 1932, wrote that his articles constituted "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper."

Duranty was born in a middle-class Liverpool family, the son of Emmeline (née Hutchins) and William Steel Durranty. He studied at Harrow, one of Britain's most prestigious public schools, but a sudden collapse in his father's business led to a transfer to Bedford College. Nevertheless, he then gained a scholarship to study at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. After completing his education, Duranty moved to Paris. During the Great War, he first worked as a reporter for The New York Times. A story Duranty filed about the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 gained him wider notice as a journalist. He then moved to Riga (Latvia) to cover events in the newly independent Baltic States.

Duranty moved to the Soviet Union in 1921.

On holiday in France in 1924, Duranty's left leg was injured in a train wreck. After the operation, the surgeon discovered gangrene; and the leg was removed. Once he had recovered, Duranty resumed his career as a journalist in the Soviet Union. During the New Economic Policy with its mixed economy, Duranty's articles from Moscow did not draw wide attention. It was after the advent of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1933), which aimed to transform Soviet industry and agriculture, that Duranty made his mark.