Yes, he was, notwithstanding the fact that he was Ukrainian himself, IIRC.
I didn’t realize that he was from the Ukraine. He should have been hung for his role in the Ukrainian famine. When he was Premier of the USSR the press played him up as a grand-fatherly type. In real life he was a stone cold killer.
Robert Conquest has written about this era of history. People in the Ukraine died while looking at tons of wheat behind fences protected by armed guards. Evil incarnate.
Stalin was Georgian—Ossetian, to be exact.
And as to Walter Duranty’s falsified reporting, besides his being a fellow-traveller, I’ve also read a suggestion that the OGPU (or NKVD, or whatever the KGB’s predecessor was called then) “had the goods” on him.