Frances Cayton, Wanda Urbanska and Lisa Grabarek (photo by Wanda Urbanska)
Frances Cayton, a 17-year-old senior at St. Mary's School in Raleigh, North Carolina, was presented a hardcover copy of Story of a Secret State on December 20 by Jan Karski Educational Foundation President Wanda Urbanska. The gift from the foundation was to mark Cayton's publication in The Concord Review, a prestigious journal of academic research papers by high school students, of "The Ukrainian Holodomor and the Western Press."
Cayton did research and discovered information about Stalin's murder of 7 million Ukrainians in the 1930s during his forced collectivization program in her sophomore Honors Western Civilization course.
"I was overwhelmed to learn about all of those who died," says Cayton of the Holodomor, Ukrainian for "murder by hunger," in the class taught by Lisa Grabarek. "I was stuck on the why-we-didn't-know-about-it piece," says the earnest and enthusiastic student.
Indeed the Holodomor so fascinated Cayton that she devoted six weeks of her own time to researching the subject, along with time during her junior year, and ultimately prepared six drafts of the paper before submitting it to The Concord Review, which accepts just 7 percent of submissions which come in from gifted students globally.
Cayton was especially upset to learn that the Western press was complicit in Stalin's cover up of the Holodomor. Walter Duranty, chief Moscow correspondent for The New York Times, was on the take from Stalin, according to Cayton's research, accepting a large apartment, a chauffeur and a mistress from the Soviets. Duranty delivered the slant that Stalin was looking for in his reports; in return, he had unparalleled access to Stalin.
In Duranty's first article on the Holodomor, published on Sept. 1, 1932, "the article mentioned an 'unsatisfactory' harvest in Ukraine, and attributed it to defiant peasants," Cayton writes. "Duranty noted that the 'demoralized' peasants sowed the fields half as quickly as the prior year, and stole from the collective farms, leading to a 'widespread shortage' of grain." The report exemplified Duranty's style of "appeasement journalism," Cayton writes. "Because Duranty dispelled Western fears of a famine in Ukraine without upsetting the Soviet Press Department, he ensured both his access to Soviet officials and status as the most respected Moscow correspondent would not change."
Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer Prize was reviewed in 2003 by the Pulitzer Prize Board but not revoked. " I was surprised they didn't strip him of his Pulitzer," says Cayton, who is currently awaiting acceptance letters from colleges and universities around the country.
"It's especially difficult to research material where deception is part of it," says Grabarek, who also received a copy of Karski's war-time memoir from Urbanska, in recognition for her behind-the-scenes role in Cayton's success.
"I look forward to re-working second semester plans for my Honors Western Civilization course in order to incorporate Karski into our unit on Europe in the early 1940s," Grabarek writes in a thank you note for the book. "Textbooks abound with information about the French Underground, and I am excited about being able to add the Polish Underground, Karski in particular, to what my students will encounter."
