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Walter Duranty was a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Moscow correspondent in the 1930s who concealed his knowledge of Josef Stalin's mass murders and other atrocities in the former Soviet Union. In 1933, for instance, at the height of the Russian famine during which millions were starved to death, Duranty wrote that "village makets [were] flowing with eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk and butter. . . . A child can see this is not famine but abundance." According to historians, reports such as these were crucial factors influencing President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to grant the Soviet Union diplomatic recognition in 1933. As historian Ronald Radosh puts it, "Duranty was a propagandist for Stalin and everything he wrote was a lie."
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