The Kremlin and the People by Walter Duranty

The Kremlin and the People by Walter Duranty is another book I read for my studies. It is a short 1942 book on Stalin, the Kremlin, the Purges, and Kirov’s murder. Because it was published in 1942, the fact that the book is mostly about the Purges of mid-1930s, when WWII was in full swing is strange to say the least.

As expected, the book avoids talking about soviet aggression towards Poland. Duranty was an apologist for Stalin, so no big surprise on what he had to say there. Of course, for research this is a highly interesting book and it is not boring to read either. The attack on Finland is talked about at length, but it has a bonkers interpretation (I will have to come up with a synonym for bonkers in my thesis, but I feel bonkers is the best word to describe that part of the book).

I think this is a very important book on the period mostly because what it missed from it (e.g. Poland!!), and how pro-soviet the rest is. With authoritarian regimes being whitewashed by various journalists and some of the intelligentsia, this book can be considered relevant even today, of course.

The Kremlin and the People by Walter Duranty

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My rating: 3/5 Stars
Would I recommend it: yes, for researchers
Published by: Hamish Hamilton
Year it was published: 1942
Format: Hardcover
Genre(s): History
Pages: 176

About the author: Walter Duranty was a British-American journalist, born in Liverpool in 1884. He died in 1957 in US. He worked as moscow bureau chief of The New York Times for fourteen years from 1921. In 1932, Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize for a series of reports about the Soviet Union, eleven of which were published in June 1931 and 2 at the end of the year. He published a few books, both fiction and non-fiction.
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