The British playboy who was STALIN’S STOOGE

Once a celebrated war reporter, Walter Duranty covered up a Kremlin-created famine that killed millions. His lies allowed the Left to carry on its blind worship of a mass murderer. Now his story’s told in an enthralling new film

WHEN he wasn’t in St Tropez basking in the sun, or at the horse racing in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne, the New York Times man in Moscow could usually be found at the bar of the Russian capital’s Metropol hotel. A veteran correspondent of the First World War, Walter Duranty became, in the early 1930s, widely recognised as the top authority on the Soviet Union.

The British-born journalist’s shrewd assessments of Bolshevik power struggles were front-page news for at least a dozen years. He was the best-known newspaperman in the world, credited with gaining diplomatic recognition in the US for the fledgling Soviet state and – while the Western world was mired in economic depression – for lauding Stalin’s Five-Year Plans as models of efficiency.

The West believed Duranty’s assessment of the ‘ triumphs’ of Communism. But his cover-up of a man-made famine – in 1932 and 1933, when the Russian dictator confiscated food from Ukrainian farmers, causing the deaths of millions – led him to be described as Stalin’s apologist.

Despite the loss of his left leg in a train accident, Duranty possessed an extraordinary attraction for women. Short, bald and unprepossessing, he seemed an unlikely sex symbol. But young American students hovered around him like rock stars’ groupies, hoping to engage his attention.

And they often succeeded, despite his having a Russian mistress discreetly at home in Moscow and a French wife, even more discreetly at a villa on the French Riviera.

In the recently released film Mr Jones, Duranty is the villain – pursuing exotic pleasures even as he covers up the genocidal famine. Gareth Jones, the Mr Jones of the film’s title, was a young Welshman who, on a three-week walking trip to Ukraine, discovered a population starving to death and reported it to the Western press. As improbable as his story must appear, it is based on actual events. But for almost 100 years, the famine has been largely forgotten, or ignored by those who knew it happened but dismissed it as an inconvenient truth.

So who was Duranty?

AS A boy, he had to leave Harrow School when his family suffered a reversal in fortune. He transferred to a less prestigious public school, Bedford, with a scholarship – extremely talented but deeply embittered by his exclusion from the ruling classes where he believed he belonged. He went on to study at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and graduated in Classics with honours. Spending time next in the seedy underworld of Paris, he befriended Aleister Crowley, the self-styled ‘Beast 666’, who dabbled in psycho-sexual seances and black magic.

Duranty wrote poems that were chanted at the ceremonies: ‘People upon the worlds, are like maggots upon an apple. All forms of life bred upon the worlds are in the nature of parasites.’ In Paris, he became a regular smoker of opium. He married Crowley’s discarded mistress, Jane Cheron, an opium addict herself conveniently in possession of a small fortune. He managed to wean himself off the drug but Cheron succumbed to her addiction.

At the start of the First World War, Duranty turned up at the Paris offices of the New York Times and so impressed bureau chief Wythe Williams that he was engaged as a stringer and later a war correspondent. He possessed writing skills that amazed Williams and the editors back home. His talent not only provided a good living but also served to keep Duranty out of the fighting, though he later said that in the face of so much death and self-sacrifice, he was ‘not over proud’ to be among the living.

The fighting he observed in his first year of covering the war accounted for his ambivalence towards moral and ethical issues. In his own words, he felt ‘a measure of indifference to blood and squalor and fear and pity. Sudden death would become a commonplace, and vermin a joke’.

It was an attitude that came in handy when he later covered the rise of the Bolshevik regime.

Having gone to Moscow, Duranty was accompanied by Cheron but she soon returned home to the more suitable French Riviera.

Duranty and Gareth Jones met in the Russian capital in the spring of 1933. By then Duranty was not just a thrill-seeker who enjoyed moments of depravity (in the film, he’s depicted naked at a party where young Russian girls are on offer and heroin in hypodermic needles is served on a silver salver) but a sophisticated, world-weary intellectual who sought his pleasures in the imaginative moral turpitude of the age.

The genesis of the Ukrainian famine of 1932- 33 was sown in Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan. The Russian dictator dreamed of an industrialised nation, competitive with the great powers of the world. But whereas the Industrial Revolution in England and elsewhere had been relatively slow, Stalin required speed. He wanted dams, grand edifices and triumphant monuments, and most of all, he wanted armaments. But how was he to finance this plan and feed the heroic workers of industry? The answer was collective agriculture. Farmers in the great breadbasket of Ukraine were to have their farms confiscated and be forced to join huge collectives where they would work, in effect, as slaves for their room and board. Any excess produce and grain would be sold abroad to finance Stalin’s grand plan.

In defiance, many farmers destroyed their animals and burned the grain they’d grown rather than cave in to the diktats of the Soviet state. And for a brief period, some gorged themselves on their grain and farm animals, slaughtering them wholesale, rather than see their hard-won profits go to Stalin’s state machine. In any case, they reasoned, what could Stalin possibly do to retaliate? Starve them all to death?

Stalin had always been suspicious of the so-called ‘kulaks’, a class of prosperous peasants scapegoated as the cause of trouble in Russia.

Classed as farmers who owned as

With one leg, he was an unlikely sex symbol, but young women flocked to him