First-hand Accounts? Walter Duranty, William Henry Chamberlin and Eugene Lyons as Moscow Correspondents in the 1930s

Abstract

ABSTRACT Previous studies on Moscow correspondents in the 1930s have prioritised the work of individual reporters over the infrastructure that actually conditioned how Western journalists could operate. This article addresses that imbalance, setting the careers of three correspondents – Walter Duranty, William Henry Chamberlin and Eugene Lyons – against the system of censorship and the control over information that prevailed in the Soviet Union. Using their published writing rather than newspaper reports, it considers how they made sense of their circumstances, and rationalised their subordinacy to Soviet oversight. It argues that for a range of reasons – ideological sympathy, financial improvement, and professional security – all three journalists themselves became parts in the machinery of censorship, learning to self-regulate and calibrate their reports to satisfy the requirements of the host regime. With the exception of Duranty, this process was subconscious as much as it was deliberate, demonstrating how the system eroded individual agency and journalistic integrity. In affirming systemic constraints on the activity of Moscow correspondents, the article also delineates Duranty as a special case of journalists who themselves became clients of the authoritarian states that they covered.