Despite all the protests, the Pulitzer Prize board has decided that it will not revoke the award won by Walter Duranty of the New York Times for his reporting in Stalin's Soviet Union. This was not a decision that it took lightly, mind you. The board's members want everyone to understand that they only took their decision after "more than six months of study and deliberation." Six months - that's around one month, perhaps less, for each million who died in the holodomor, the man-made famine that Duranty tried so hard to deny.
Here's how Petro Solovyschuk from the Ukraine's Vinnytsia region remembers that time:
I no longer lived in my house. I slept in patches of clover, in haystacks; I was swollen from hunger, my clothes were in shreds. Our house was torn down and they took everything to the collective farm. Only a pile of clay remained. And there is no trace of my family - not a grave, nor a cross. There are only these names: my father - Makar Solovyschuk, died May 1933; my mother - Oliana Solovyschuk, died March 1933; my brother - Ivan Solovy-schuk, died April 1933; my sister - Motrya Solovyschuk, died April 1933.
Here's what Walter Duranty said in June of that year: "The 'famine' is mostly bunk."
- Excerpt from recent column
by Andrew Stuttaford
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