THIS IS A FOLLOW UP to my two-part series on the Ukrainian Holodomor, the famine of the early 1930s (Genocide? You Decide, April 23 and 30, 2008). Five pieces of evidence show that the death of an estimated 7 million was a true genocide:

1) Although at first starvation was caused by the brutal implementation of agricultural collectivization, by the end of 1931, all Soviet Ukraine was targeted as an enemy, and therefore for destruction. 2) In 1932, the distribution of food was cut off by the government. The subsequent harvest was then confiscated and destroyed. 3) When starving people began eating their dogs and cats, these animals were systematically destroyed. 4) Since no village in Ukraine had met its impossible 1931 grain quota, trade in foodstuffs was prohibited throughout the republic. 5) When starving people began wandering the country looking for food, “passportization,” confining them to their villages and condemning them to death, was decreed.

Walter Duranty (1884-1957), a native Scotsman, was Moscow correspondent for The New York Times from 1921 to 1934. In 1931, he wrote 13 laudatory pieces about Stalin’s leadership in liberating peasants and workers from centuries of oppression under Czarist rule. For his work he won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize. The honor has been an affront to Ukrainians for three-quarters of a century, and there has been a long campaign to pressure the Pulitzer Prize board to rescind the award.

In 2003, the board reviewed the award. The Times had no objection. Its executive editor, Bill Keller, called Duranty’s work “pretty dreadful.” But on Nov. 21, 2003, the Pulitzer board declined to revoke the award. It concluded that without actual deception shown, revoking a prize when the principals were dead and unable to respond “would be a momentous step.” It also noted that Duranty’s prize was awarded for articles published in 1931 –– before the full onset of the Holodomor, in 1932. Keep that thought.

Many in the Ukrainian diaspora have expressed strong opinions about Duranty’s prize without having read the 13 articles for which he received it. I thought it meet to do so, but on inquiring found that, although the Pulitzer Prizes have published decades of winning entries in book form, in Duranty’s case Columbia University, which administers the prizes, honors The New York Times’s copyright. (The question of the Pulitzer Prize board’s current sincerity is not important enough to deal with here.) But, God bless the Internet, there are copies all over the diaspora!

Eleven of Duranty’s articles appeared in The Times as “special cables” between June 14 and June 27, 1931. They were obviously written in advance and prepared to make a splash. Knowing how newspapers play for prizes today, I suppose they could have been written to win a Pulitzer. But that’s another relatively unimportant question.

With little documentation or specific reporting, Duranty writes of Russia as one in the know. He makes sweeping historical pronouncements evoking (or burlesquing) Arnold Toynbee, the grand British historian of epochs and civilizations: “The [Soviet] system on the whole seems to work more smoothly than any organization of a heterogeneous State yet devised by man” (June 26, 1931). But Duranty’s glib style most reminds me of Dr. David Reuben’s 1969 Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), in that the author knew a lot more about writing a best-seller than he did about his subject matter.

So Duranty. But the word “Ukraine” only appears twice in the 13 articles. The Pulitzer board is correct that the articles for which he won the prize do not directly implicate him in covering up atrocities. However, in 1932, British journalists Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge, who had secretly entered Ukraine, began telling the truth about the Holodomor when its horrors were at their fullest. Their work was an unintentional trap in that it exposed Duranty’s mind: He denounced the stories and expressly denied the truth.

On March 31, 1933, Duranty denounced Jones by name in The Times, calling reports of millions threatened with death from starvation “a big scare story . . . from a British source.” But he reportedly later admitted to British diplomat William Stang that 10 million might have died in in 1932. Duranty was Stalin’s shill. Muggeridge called him “the greatest liar I have met in journalism.”

The Pulitzer board’s “chronology defense” is misleading because the truth is darker than its 1932 predecessor having been duped by a newspaper that had been duped by a “liar.” The atrocities in Ukraine were being repeated in Kazakhstan, southern Russia and the Volga German Republic. Stalin did everything he could to keep word of the catastrophe from being known in the Soviet Union and, particularly, in the West, with which he desperately needed to establish trade.

Duranty’s 1931 cables thus came as a gift outright. They let Stalin know he now had a free hand. It’s not that Duranty covered up a genocide, it’s that he prepared its way. The meaning of his Pulitzer Prize is that in its cocksure 1932 certitudes, American journalism at the highest levels cleared the way for mass murder. For those of us working today this is a profound lesson in the need for self-doubt.

David A. Mittell Jr. is a member of The Journal’s editorial board.