The 1930s Ukrainian famine revisited

[Dmitry]

The Federal Archival Agency of Russia presents documents on the famine in English:
"Famine in the USSR 1929-1934. New documentary evidence"
http://www.rusarchives.ru/publication/f ... e-ussr.pdf (139Mb)

[David Thompson]

Ukraine: opening of secret archives shines light on famine, repression (Christian Science Monitor)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20090505/ts_csm/oarchive

[David Thompson]

Diary that helped expose Stalin's famine displayed

By Raphael G. Satter, Associated Press Writer

LONDON – The diaries of a British reporter who risked his reputation to expose the horrors of Stalin's murderous famine in Ukraine were put on public display for the first time Friday.

Welsh journalist Gareth Jones sneaked into Ukraine in March of 1933, at the height of a famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Millions of people starved to death between 1932 and 1933 as the Soviet secret police emptied the countryside of grain and livestock as part of a campaign to force peasants into collective farms.

Jones' reporting was one of the 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 Ukrainians perished in what is sometimes referred to as the Great Famine.

Walking from village to village, Jones recorded conversations with desperate people 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 a 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 Jones' article as a scare story.

"Conditions are bad, but there is no famine," Duranty wrote. Other correspondents chimed in with public denials, and 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 by bandits in 1935 while covering Japan's expansion into China in the run-up to World War II. The full circumstances of his death remain murky.

Britain's World War I-era prime minister, David Lloyd George, whom Jones had once served as an aide, said 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 show at the Wren Library at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where he was a student, until mid-December. The university said it was the first time that the documents — which had been in the care of Jones' family — were being publicly displayed.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091113/ap_ ... ne_diaries

[nobodyofnote]

Journalist Gareth Jones' 1935 murder examined by BBC Four



A Welsh journalist who once flew with Adolf Hitler, helped expose genocide in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and died in mysterious circumstances, is the subject of a new TV documentary.

Gareth Jones, who was also a personal aide to former prime minister David Lloyd George, helped expose Stalin's "holodomor" policy of deliberate starvation.

This claimed the lives of anywhere between 4m and 10m peasant farmers in the Ukraine during 1932/33.

Jones also formed relations with the Nazis in Germany and even flew aboard Hitler's private plane.

But in 1935 he was murdered in murky circumstances while reporting from Japanese-occupied Mongolia.

Now Hitler, Stalin and Mr Jones, on BBC Four's Storyville strand on Thursday, is examining the 77-year-old mystery of his death.

"Gareth Jones was almost an Icarus-type character, who knew how close to the sun he was flying, but couldn't seem to resist the temptation to expose tyrannical abuse of power," said George Carey, director of the programme.

Born in the south Wales coastal town of Barry in 1905, Jones earned a first in French from Aberystwyth University in 1926, securing the same grade in French, Russian and German at Trinity College, Cambridge, three years later.

His linguistic skills saw him rise to prominence in diplomatic circles, and by 1930 he was foreign policy adviser to the former prime minister, fellow Welshman David Lloyd George.

While some contemporaries accused him of harbouring Nazi sympathies, according to Mr Carey, history appears not to bear this out.

"It's certainly true to say that Gareth Jones networked extremely well with the Nazis, and secured almost unprecedented access to Hitler and Goebbels," he said.

"He was there in Leipzig when Hitler was made chancellor, and flew with him to Frankfurt for his first rally.

Peasant farmers

"And it's also fair to say that he reported favourably on some of the early achievements of the Nazis, creating employment when mainstream politicians had failed to get to grips with the German economy."

It seems as though Jones's attentions always lay in the direction of the Soviet Union.

Backed by Lloyd George's credibility, he was able to travel throughout the USSR and met Russian politicians, while his language skills allowed him to speak to peasant farmers.

However, his warm Soviet welcome would cool abruptly in March 1933, when Jones called a press conference in Berlin to reveal the findings of his two months undercover in starving Ukraine.

The mainstream media poured scorn on Jones' account, and for a time he was reduced to obscurity. By mid-1933 he had returned home to Barry to live with his parents and he worked as a junior reporter on the Western Mail.

But months later he learned about a new international scandal, in the shape of the Japanese occupation of Inner Mongolia, and he set off there as soon as he could to raise the funds.

'Agent'

The trip would prove his downfall, as he and his companion, a German journalist named Muller, were captured by bandits in remote countryside, after being turned away by Japanese forces.

Mr Carey said Jones's death had always been surrounded by controversy, as it was unclear whether the bandits were tipped off by the Japanese, or by the Russian secret police, the NKVD.

"Until now all that was known for certain was that Muller was released on a highly spurious pretext about having been freed on parole in order to raise the ransom, and two days later Gareth was shot for no conceivable reason," he said.

"Probably we'll never know for certain what happened. However our investigations have shown that the Chinese contact who loaned Jones and Muller a car to travel to Mongolia was definitely an NKVD agent, and there's strong evidence to suggest that Muller might also have been."

Gareth Jones died a largely discredited figure, on the eve of his 30th birthday, the truth about Stalin's holodomor only coming to light years later.

However, today he is revered as a national hero in the Ukraine, and is honoured at both Cambridge and Aberystwyth universities.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-sout ... s-18691109 (BBC News, 5th July 2012).

Video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... _Mr_Jones/ (Only available in UK).