Walter Duranty (May 25th, 1884 – October 3rd, 1957) was an Anglo-American journalist who served as the Moscow Bureau Chief of The New York Times (1922–36). Duranty was born in Liverpool to Emmeline (née Hutchins) and William Steel Durranty. He originally studied at Harrow, one of Britain’s most prestigious public schools, but a sudden collapse in his father’s business led to a transfer to Bedford College. Nevertheless, he then gained a scholarship to study at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. During WWI he worked as a reporter for The New York Times. Duranty moved to the Soviet Construct in 1921 directly coinciding with the beginning of the first Holodomor and forced famine in Russia. Now acknowledged as “some of the worst reporting to appear in [The New York Times]” in 1932 Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of reports made about the so called ‘Soviet Union’. There was sharp criticism of his denial of widespread famine and mass starvation across Russia and the Ukraine and calls to The New York Times, who had submitted Duranty’s work for the prize to revoke his Pulitzer. Indeed Duranty denounced reports of a famine in The New York Times on 31st March 1933, and, in particular, he attacked Gareth Jones, a British journalist who had witnessed the starving in Ukraine and issued a widely published press release about their plight two days earlier in Berlin. Duranty’s name has become synonymous with thinly veiled propaganda masquerading as news and out right support for Bolshevik Communism. The fact that Duranty was the only reporter allowed to move around Russia unaccompanied is in itself damming. Duranty also later married the Jewess Jane Cheron and was a close friend of Aleister Crowley.