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When he finished the story, the journalist took two carbon copies to Stalin. Lyons had signed one with a note of thanks for the Soviet leader. The other, he asked Stalin to sign. "It might make it easier to get it past the censors. There is censorship on the news here," Lyons joked. Stalin obliged, signing in Russian, "More or less correct. J. Stalin." Lyons kept the signed copy for the rest of his life.

Lyons' story appeared all over the world. Not only was Stalin alive, he was a real person, with pink flesh and a love for his children, Lyons dutifully reported. In the weeks after the interview, Lyons enjoyed notoriety and congratulations. Although he wrote in his memoirs, "Amidst the telegrams and jubilation of my employers, I was depressed by the feeling of a magnificent opportunity frittered away." 

Two years later, Lyons, along with most of the other regular Moscow correspondents would fritter away another opportunity, one that might have been the scoop of the decade. By 1932, conditions in the USSR, especially in the countryside, had grown dire. A famine was sweeping through villages in Ukraine and southern Russia. Today's estimates show that five to seven million peasants starved in the famine of 1932-33. The conditions weren't accidental or as with many famines, climate-induced. It was government-caused. Red Army soldiers appropriated grain, sometimes at gunpoint, from the farmers who grew it. Peasants were shot for hoarding food. Villagers ate the bark off trees and seeds they picked out of manure. They slaughtered livestock rather than hand over the animals to the state's collective farms.

Historians disagree about what accounts for the zealotry of the grain appropriations. Stalin, some say, wanted to punish peasants for reluctance to trade their private property for places in large collective farms. It was Stalin's way of re-educating them from capitalists into Soviets, they assert. More recently, however, experts have argued that the Soviet government was starving its peasants to feed enormous industrial growth. Grain was one of the few sources of the revenue Stalin had to purchase foreign machinery for a belated industrial revolution. Factory workers in the cities also needed food. The peasants, the ones growing the food, were, in the eyes of Stalin, ignorant and backward people, who were not only expendable but were slowing the Soviet Union's progress.

Lyons and the rest of the cadre of American and British journalists in the USSR in the early 1930s in large part ignored human suffering, oppression and starvation and instead created and maintained a longstanding image of a socialist utopia. This image, set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and a collapsing world economy, fueled a worldwide boom in the communist movement.  During the 1930s, a decade in which the number of unemployed Americans reached 20 million, membership in the American communist party tripled, peaking at 100,000 in 1939.

Like Lyons, most of the Moscow reporters produced soft features describing the curiosity and novelty of the Soviet experiment rather than covering the rocky terrain of  politics, economics, or worse yet, human suffering. Human suffering and starvation rarely made the front page. For example, in 1931, rather than cover politics or economics or the precursors to the coming famine, the journalists were charged by their home editors with covering playwright George Bernard Shaw's tour of the USSR. For two weeks, the reporters grumbled as Shaw took in the ready-made Potemkin sights, such as a well-run factory, a faux hospital, and farmers primped to look prosperous. Shaw, Lyons later recalled, judged "food conditions by the (grand tourist hotel) Metropol's menu, collectivization by the model farm, … and socialism by the twittering sycophants."

The playwright later recounted his trip in the New York Times as if setting up the idyllic opening act of a play. As the U.S. slipped deeper into the Great Depression, as American families went without food and workers without jobs, Shaw praised the regime overseeing the 14-year-old Soviet experiment as "the ablest and most enlightened in the world." He wrote to New Yorkers, whose jobless ranks would swell to 630,000 by 1933, that "In Russia, there is no unemployment, and the people are healthy, carefree and full of hope." Like Shaw, thousands of enthusiastic Americans, artists and professors flocked to the USSR, where official guides led them on carefully defined tours, showing off well fed farmers and efficient, happy factory workers.

In 1929 only 2,500 Americans visited the USSR. Two years later, in 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression, 10,000 Americans visited. In the U.S., an English translation of a book for Soviet school children, "New Russia's Primer," was among the top ten nonfiction bestsellers of 1932 – the same year the government-instigated famine started in Ukraine and rural Russia. Many historians now count the forced starvation of 1932-1933 in Ukraine among the 20th century's worst genocides. Yet it wasn't even among the top priorities of the Brits and Americans reporting from Moscow.

In fact, the Moscow foreign press corps was essentially just a collection of journalists covering the Kremlin – not Russia or the Soviet Union. The reporters' every dispatch was subject to the blue pen of a censor before it could be cabled to the states. The process became one of negotiation and euphemism, in which censors and reporters often hashed out wording face-to-face. It was a rather liberal form of censorship compared to the oppressive environments foreign correspondents sometimes encountered in places such as Italy, Japan and, under some regimes,  France and Germany. In those countries, at various times in history, censors sliced sections out of stories without discussing their actions with reporters, who sometimes didn't learn of the editing until weeks later when they received copies of their home newspapers. The Moscow journalists, by contrast, knew exactly what the censors were cutting.

In addition, the Soviets employed constant intimidation to control foreign reporters. At any time, the Soviet government could take the journalists' visas, cut off the flow of information, or even arrest, harass or punish their Russian wives or girlfriends. As a result, American reporters tried in large part to stay friendly with the Soviets. Few reporters left the comfort of Moscow apartments, bars or mistresses for other cities unless on a government junket. The Western journalists knew what was happening in the countryside. Their many memoirs and other documents tell of terror reigning in the villages. They saw the emaciated villagers who migrated to cities in hopes of finding food or work. Some correspondents hinted at discontent and discomfort in Russia in their dispatches. Few, however, tackled the true suffering head on.

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