1.  1930s JOURNALIST GARETH JONES TO HAVE STORY RETOLD
Correspondent who exposed Soviet Ukraine's manmade famine focus of new documentary
Mark Brown, Arts Correspondent, Guardian
London, United Kingdom, Friday 13 November 2009

 

2.  DIARY THAT HELPED EXPOSE STALIN'S FAMINE DISPLAYED
Welsh journalist Gareth Jones snuck into Ukraine in March of 1933
By Raphael G. Satter, The Associated Press (AP)
London, United Kingdom, Thursday, November 12, 2009
The Washington Post, Washington, D.C., Friday, November 13, 2009

The Boston Globe, Boston, Massaschusetts, Friday, November 13, 2009

FoxNews11AZ, Tucson, Arizona, Thursday, November 12, 2009

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Mark Brown, Arts Correspondent, Guardian
London, United Kingdom, Friday 13 November 2009

LONDON - In death he has become known as "the man who knew too much" – a fearless young British reporter who walked from one desperate, godforsaken village to another exposing the true horror of a famine that was killing millions.

Gareth Jones's accounts of what was happening in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33 were different from other western accounts. Not only did he reveal the true extent of starvation, he reported on the Stalin regime's failure to deliver aid while exporting grain to the west. The tragedy is now known as the Holodomar
and regarded by Ukrainians as genocide.

Two years after the articles Jones was killed by Chinese bandits in Inner Mongolia – murdered, according to his family, in a Moscow plot as punishment.

The remarkable story of Jones is being told afresh by his old university, Cambridge, which is putting on public display for the first time Jones's handwritten diaries from his time in Ukraine.

They will go on display at the Wren Library alongside items relating to rather better known Trinity old boys such as Newton, Wittgenstein and AA Milne, coinciding with a new documentary about Jones and the famine – "The Living" – which gets its British premiere this evening.

The story of Jones, a devout, non-comformist teetotaller from Barry, often has elements of Indiana Jones and Zelig.

Rory Finnan, a lecturer in Ukrainian studies at Cambridge, called him "a true hero"."He is a remarkable historical figure and it is also remarkable that he is not well known. Jones was the only journalist who risked his name and reputation to expose the Holodomor to the world."

Jones became interested in Ukraine and learned Russian because of his mother who worked as a governess for the family of John Hughes, a Merthyr Tydfil engineer who founded a town in southern Ukraine called Hughesovka – now called Donetsk.

After graduating, Jones was introduced to David Lloyd George and quickly became his foreign adviser, visiting the USSR for the first time as the former prime minister's eyes and ears.

It was in 1932-33 though that Jones would make his name, walking alone along a railway line visiting villages during a terrible famine that killed millions.

He sent moving stories of survivors to British, American and German newspapers but they were rubbished by the Stalin regime – and derided by Moscow-based western journalists, men like the New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who wrote: "There is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be," and dismissed Jones' eyewitness accounts as a "big scare story".

The only other reporter writing about the extent of the famine was Malcolm Muggeridge in the Manchester Guardian, although his three articles were heavily cut and not bylined.

In the Ukraine, Jones is something of a national hero and last year both he and Muggeridge were awarded the highest honour Ukraine gives to non-citizens, the order of freedom, for their reporting during 1932-33.

But there is more to Jones's story and a Zelig-like quality to his life. For example, he was once on a 16-seat aircraft with the new German chancellor, Adolph Hitler, and Joseph Goebbels, on their way to a rally in Frankfurt. Jones wrote for the Western Mail that if the plane had crashed the history of western Europe history would have changed forever.

Another time, outside the gates of the White House, he saw the one-time American president Herbert Hoover preparing to have his photograph taken with schoolchildren. Soon enough, somehow, Jones is in the photograph.

After his Ukraine articles Jones was banned from the USSR and, in many eyes, discredited. The only work he could get was in Cardiff on the Western Mail covering "arts, crafts and coracles", according to his great-nephew Nigel Linsan Colley. But again his life changed.

He managed to get an interview with a local castle owner: William Randolph Hearst who owned St Donat's Castle near Cardiff. The newspaper magnate was obviously taken by Jones's accounts of what had happened in Ukraine and invited the reporter to the US.

Jones dutifully arrived at Hearst's private station – as Chico Marx was leaving the estate – and wrote three articles for Hearst and used, for the first time, the phrase "manmade famine".

Again the articles were damned and wrongly discredited. Banned from the USSR, Jones decided he wanted to explore what was going on in the far east and, in particular, what Japan's intentions were. The day before his 30th birthday Jones was kidnapped and killed by Chinese bandits. Jones's descendants believe it happened with the complicity of Moscow. "There is no direct proof," said Colley, "but plenty of indirect proof."

Colley is pleased that his great-uncle is getting the recognition he believes is deserved and the family is clearly proud. "I don't know whether he was brave or stupid. He knew the risks he was taking, I think, but because he was a British citizen he thought he was indestructible."

LINK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/nov/13/gareth-jones-story-retold-documentary

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2.  DIARY THAT HELPED EXPOSE STALIN'S FAMINE DISPLAYED
Welsh journalist Gareth Jones snuck into Ukraine in March of 1933

By Raphael G. Satter, The Associated Press (AP)
London, United Kingdom, Thursday, November 12, 2009
The Washington Post, Washington, D.C., Friday, November 13, 2009
The Boston Globe, Boston, Massachusetts, Friday, November 13, 2009

LONDON -- The diaries of a British reporter who risked his reputation to expose the horrors of Stalin's murderous famine in Ukraine are to go on display on Friday.

Welsh journalist Gareth Jones snuck into Ukraine in March of 1933, at the height of an artificial famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as part of his campaign to force peasants into collective farms. Millions were starving to death as the Soviet secret police emptied the countryside of grain and livestock.

Jones' reporting was one of first attempts to bring the disaster to the world's attention.

"Famine Grips Russia - Millions Dying" read the front page of the New York Evening Post on March 29, 1933. "Famine on a colossal scale, impending death of millions from hunger, murderous terror ... this is the summary of Mr. Jones's firsthand observations," the paper said.

As starvation and cannibalism spread across Ukraine, Soviet authorities exported more than a million tons of grain to the West, using the money to build factories and arm its military.

Historians say that between 4 million and 5 million people perished in 1932-1933 in what Ukrainians called the Great Famine.

Walking from village to village, Jones recorded desperate Ukrainians scrambling for food, scribbling brief interviews in pencil on lined notebooks.

"They all had the same story: 'There is no bread - we haven't had bread for two months - a lot are dying,'" Jones wrote in one entry.

"We are the living dead," he quoted one peasant as saying.

Jones' eyewitness account had little effect on world opinion at the time. Stalin's totalitarian regime tightly controlled the flow of information out of the U.S.S.R., and many Moscow-based foreign correspondents - some of whom had pro-Soviet sympathies - refused to believe Jones' reporting.

The New York Times' Walter Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, dismissed his article as a scare story.
"Conditions are bad, but there is no famine," Duranty wrote a few days after Jones' story was published. Other correspondents chimed in with public denials.

With his colleagues against him, Jones was discredited.

Eugene Lyons, an American wire agency reporter who gradually went from communist sympathizer to fierce critic of the Soviet regime, later acknowledged the role that fellow journalists had played in trying to destroy Jones' career.

 

"Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials," Lyons wrote in his 1937 autobiography, "Assignment in Utopia."

 

Lyons' admission came too late for Jones, who was killed under murky circumstances while covering Japan's expansion into China in the run-up to World War II.

British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, whom Jones had once served as an aide, said shortly after his death in 1935 that the intrepid journalist might have been killed because he "knew too much of what was going on."

 

"I had always been afraid that he would take one risk too many."

 

Jones' handwritten diaries are on display at the Wren Library at Trinity College in Cambridge, where he was a student, until mid-December 2009.

 

On the Net: Trinity College: http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/

Web site devoted to Gareth Jones: http://www.garethjones.org/

LINK: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/12/AR2009111210298.html

 

LINK: http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2009/11/12/diary_that_helped_expose_stalins_famine_displayed/

 

LINK: http://www.fox11az.com/news/world/69872487.html

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Mr. E. Morgan Williams, Director, Government Affairs,
Washington Office, SigmaBleyzer;
President/CEO, U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC);
Publisher & Editor, Action Ukraine Report (AUR);

Founder/Trustee: Holodomor: Through The Eyes of Ukrainian Artists

Founder/Trustee: Gulag, Through The Eyes of Ukrainain Artists
1701 K Street, NW, Suite 903, Washington, D.C. 20006
Telephone: 202 437 4707; E-Mail: [email protected]