The Anniversary That Should Not Be Forgotten
Tomorrow 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.
It’s hard to fathom the numbers involved: 680,000 executions counted by the official Soviet tally; historians, however, estimate the number to exceed one million, while countless others were broken and ruined in the camps.
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.
Duranty wasn't just a beat reporter; he was the Times' Moscow bureau chief, the gatekeeper for American eyes. He wove an intricate web of lies that created a blanket to conceal the truth. Duranty was so good at it that he won a Pulitzer Prize. Instead of pulling the blanket, he shone the light into the darkness, threw another blanket on top, and wrote that famine rumors were vastly exaggerated.
Related: Pulitzer Prize, Meet the WALTER DURANTY PRIZE
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.
Because liberals of the 1930s preferred socialism's narrative over the finality and reality of its corpses.
The Intersection of Tyranny and Bias
The anniversary of Stalin's purge becomes more than simply a footnote of Soviet history; it represents tyranny at its most naked. What we know now is that the Pulitzer Duranty award represents the deadliest version of media bias. Combined, this anniversary forms a cautionary tale that spans decades: The tyrant suppresses the truth through the use of force. Journalists eliminate the truth using omission. Both leave a society blind and disarmed.
The elites of the West nodded along to Duranty's dispatches, dismissing the famine as mere gossip. They underestimated Stalin's terror, both in its scale and its impact.
The reality on the ground did not mold public opinion. Instead, opinions were materialized by a newspaper of record telling polite lies, and by the time the truth finally leaked out, millions of lives were lost.
Duranty's reporting didn't kill them. But his words acted as shovels, burying their stories.
A Pattern That Echoes Today
Media bias is never just about slanted words; policies and perceptions are changed and shaped, while tilting the moral field that nations play on.
Duranty not only protected Stalin for his lies, but this work also generated a pattern that still survives when media outlets use their voices to downplay crime in American cities, or more specifically, democratically run cities, excusing violence by favored groups, like BLM and Antifa, filtering facts using the lens of a tainted ideology before distributing them to their leftist audience.
Bias doesn't become inconvenient; it acts like an accomplice.
"Democracy Dies in Darkness" and "All the News Fit to Print" are mottos for the Washington Post and the New York Times, respectively. It's publications like these that share congratulations with like-minded people in print and onscreen. They are, they say, the guardians of truth, yet Duranty illustrates what happens when those guardians become gatekeepers. They decide not only what's printed, but what's to be believed. The Pulitzer didn't redeem Duranty; it was an indictment of an entire industry that chose comfort over courage.
Final Thoughts
Stalin's Great Purge serves as a poignant reminder of what unchecked power can do to a nation. Walter Duranty demonstrated the impact of unchecked bias on the truth. One is remembered in the tally of bodies buried, the other in the tally of lies.
These acts demand to be studied together because they show just how narrow the line between tyranny and silence is. When the press hides atrocities, it eliminates any objectivity, effectively becoming a collaborator.
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," written by Lord Acton, 49 years before the purges started, describes Stalin accurately down to his DNA. It boils down to this:
Stalin’s NKVD filled graves, and Duranty filled columns.
History judges both.
Want More of the Stories the Media Buries?
PJ Media does not play along with the gatekeepers. We expose narratives, challenge biases, and put truth above the comfort of elites. Become a PJ Media VIP member today and keep real journalism alive.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member