* The left-wing journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, disgusted by Duranty’s failure to report the truth about the Ukrainian famine, once called Duranty “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism.” Muggeridge further described Duranty as one of numerous leftists who had “resolved, come what might, to believe anything, however preposterous, to overlook anything, however villainous, to approve anything, however obscurantist and brutally authoritarian, in order to be able to preserve intact the confident expectation that one of the most thorough-going, ruthless and bloody tyrannies ever to exist on earth could be relied on to champion human freedom, the brotherhood of man, and all the other good liberal causes to which they had dedicated their lives.”

* In a similar spirit, historian Ronald Radosh avers that “Duranty was a propagandist for Stalin, and everything he wrote was a lie.”

* Scholar and author Jamie Glazov, for his part, contends that: “Duranty intentionally covered up this whole massacre because he supported it. Just like the despotism he venerated, he wanted millions to die. Like every believer in earthly utopia, he yearned for the destruction of this world, since in his political vision, as in the vision of the Stalins and Maos and Pol Pots, it is only through human blood that this world can be purified. An earthly paradise can only be built on the ashes of millions of human corpses.”