Introduction
Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones (13 August 1905 – 12 August 1935) was a Welsh journalist who first reported in the Western world, without equivocation and under his own name, the existence of the Soviet famine of 1932–33, including the Holodomor. Earlier reports by Malcolm Muggeridge, writing as an anonymous correspondent, had appeared in the Manchester Guardian.
Early life and education
Born in Barry, Glamorgan, Jones attended Barry County School, where his father, Major Edgar Jones, was headmaster until around 1933. His mother, Annie Gwen Jones, had worked in Russia as a tutor to the children of Arthur Hughes, son of Welsh steel industrialist John Hughes, who founded the town of Hughesovka, modern-day Donetsk, in Ukraine.
Jones graduated from the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1926 with a first-class honours degree in French. He also studied at the University of Strasbourg and at Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1929 with another first in French, German, and Russian. After his death, one of his tutors, Hugh Fraser Stewart, wrote in The Times that Jones had been an "extraordinary linguist". At Cambridge he was active in the Cambridge University League of Nations Union, serving as its assistant secretary.
Career
Teaching, private secretary
After graduating, Jones taught languages briefly at Cambridge, then in 1930 was appointed Foreign Affairs Adviser (akin to a private secretary) to David Lloyd George, former British Prime Minister, thanks to an introduction by Dr Tom Jones. That summer, Jones made his first brief "pilgrimage" to Donetsk (by then renamed Stalino).
Germany
Later in the 1930s, Jones became a reporter for the Western Mail in Cardiff. In late January and early February 1933 he was in Germany covering the accession to power of the Nazi Party, and was in Leipzig on the day Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor. A few days later on 23 February in the Richthofen, "the fastest and most powerful three-motored aeroplane in Germany", Jones became one of the first foreign journalists to fly with Hitler as he accompanied Hitler and Joseph Goebbels to Frankfurt where he reported for the Western Mail on the new Chancellor's tumultuous acclamation in that city. He wrote that if the Richthofen had crashed the history of Europe would have changed.
Soviet Union
The following month, March 1933, Jones travelled to the Soviet Union and on 7 March eluded authorities to slip into Ukraine, where he kept diaries of the man-made starvation he witnessed. On his return to Berlin on 29 March, he issued his press release, which was published by many newspapers, including The Manchester Guardian and the New York Evening Post:
I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, 'There is no bread. We are dying'. This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.
In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided. I stayed overnight in a village where there used to be two hundred oxen and where there now are six. The peasants were eating the cattle fodder and had only a month's supply left. They told me that many had already died of hunger. Two soldiers came to arrest a thief. They warned me against travel by night, as there were too many 'starving' desperate men.
'We are waiting for death' was my welcome, but see, we still, have our cattle fodder. Go farther south. There they have nothing. Many houses are empty of people already dead,' they cried.
This report was unwelcome in a great many of the newspapers, as the intelligentsia of the time was still in sympathy with the Soviet regime. On 31 March, The New York Times published a denial of Jones' statement by Walter Duranty under the headline "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving". Duranty called Jones' report "a big scare story". Timothy Snyder writes that "Duranty's claim that there was 'no actual starvation' but only 'widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition' echoed Soviet usages and pushed euphemism into mendacity. This was an Orwellian distinction; and indeed George Orwell himself regarded the Ukrainian famine of 1933 as a central example of a black truth that artists of language had covered with bright colors."
In the article, Kremlin sources denied the existence of a famine; part of the New York Time's headline was: "Russian and Foreign Observers in Country See No Ground for Predications of Disaster." On 13 April Jones published a detailed analysis of the famine in Financial Times, pointing out to its main causes: forced collectivization of private farms, removal of 6-7 millions of "best workers" (the Kulaks) from their land, forced requisitions of grain and farm animals and increased "export of foodstuffs" from USSR.
What are the causes of the famine? The main reason for the catastrophe in Russian agriculture is the Soviet policy of collectivisation. The prophecy of Paul Scheffer in 1920–30 that collectivisation of agriculture would be the nemesis of Communism has come absolutely true.
— Gareth Jones, Financial Times, 13 April 1933
On 13 May the newspaper published a strong rebuttal from Jones, who stood by his report:
My first evidence was gathered from foreign observers. Since Mr. Duranty introduces consuls into the discussion, a thing I am loath to do, for they are official representatives of their countries and should not be quoted, may I say that I discussed the Russian situation with between twenty and thirty consuls and diplomatic representatives of various nations and that their evidence supported my point of view. But they are not allowed to express their views in the press, and therefore remain silent. Journalists, on the other hand, are allowed to write, but the censorship has turned them into masters of euphemism and understatement. Hence they give "famine" the polite name of 'food shortage' and 'starving to death' is softened down to read as 'widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition'. Consuls are not so reticent in private conversation.
In a personal letter from Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov (whom Jones had interviewed while in Moscow) to Lloyd George, Jones was informed that he was banned from ever visiting the Soviet Union again.
Japan and China
Banned from the Soviet Union, Jones turned his attention to the Far East and in late 1934 he left Britain on a "Round-the-World Fact-Finding Tour". He spent about six weeks in Japan, interviewing important generals and politicians, and he eventually reached Beijing. From here he traveled to Inner Mongolia in newly Japanese-occupied Manchukuo in the company of a German journalist, Herbert Müller. Detained by Japanese forces, the pair were told that there were three routes back to the Chinese town of Kalgan, only one of which was safe.
The men were subsequently captured by bandits who demanded a ransom of 200 Mauser firearms and 100,000 Chinese dollars (according to The Times, equivalent to about ₤8,000). The German journalist was released after two days to arrange for the ransom to be paid. On 1 August, Jones's father received a telegram: "Well treated. Expect release soon." On 5 August The Times reported that the kidnappers had moved Jones to an area 10 miles south-east of Kuyuan and were now asking for 10,000 Chinese dollars (about ₤800), and two days later that he had again been moved, this time to Jehol. On 8 August the news came that the first group of kidnappers had handed him over to a second group, and the ransom had increased to 100,000 Chinese dollars again. The Chinese and Japanese governments both made an effort to contact the kidnappers.
Death
On 17 August 1935, The Times reported that the Chinese authorities had found Jones's body the previous day with three bullet wounds. The authorities believed that he had been killed on 12 August, the day before his 30th birthday. There was a suspicion that his murder had been engineered by the Soviet NKVD, as revenge for the embarrassment he had caused the Soviet regime. Lloyd George is reported to have said:
That part of the world is a cauldron of conflicting intrigue and one or other interests concerned probably knew that Mr Gareth Jones knew too much of what was going on. He had a passion for finding out what was happening in foreign lands wherever there was trouble, and in pursuit of his investigations he shrank from no risk. I had always been afraid that he would take one risk too many. Nothing escaped his observation, and he allowed no obstacle to turn from his course when he thought that there was some fact, which he could obtain. He had the almost unfailing knack of getting at things that mattered.
Legacy
Film
Serhii Bukovs'kyi's 2008 Ukrainian film The Living is a documentary about the Great Famine of 1932–33 and Jones's attempts to uncover it. The Living premiered 21 November 2008 at the Kyiv Cinema House. It was screened in February 2009 at the European Film Market, in spring 2009 at the Ukrainian Film Festival in Cologne, and in November 2009 at the Second Annual Cambridge Festival of Ukrainian Film. It received the 2009 Special Jury Prize Silver Apricot in the International Documentary Competition at the Sixth Golden Apricot International Film Festival in July 2009 and the 2009 Grand Prize of Geneva in September 2009.
In 2015, a feature film titled Mr. Jones, based on Jones' famine reporting, was announced. In April 2016 it was announced that the Oscar-nominated Polish director Agnieszka Holland would direct the picture. English actor James Norton plays Gareth Jones. In January 2019, the film was selected to compete for the Golden Bear at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival. In September 2019 film won Grand Prix Golden Lions at the 44th Gdynia Film Festival.
Memorial
On 2 May 2006, a trilingual (English/Welsh/Ukrainian) plaque was unveiled in Jones' memory in the Old College at Aberystwyth University, in the presence of his niece Margaret Siriol Colley, and the Ukrainian Ambassador to the UK, Ihor Kharchenko, who described him as an "unsung hero of Ukraine". The idea for a plaque and funding were provided by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, working in conjunction with the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain. Dr Lubomyr Luciuk, UCCLA's director of research, spoke at the unveiling ceremony.
In November 2008, Jones and fellow Holodomor journalist Malcolm Muggeridge were posthumously awarded the Ukrainian Order of Merit at a ceremony in Westminster Central Hall, by Dr Kharchenko, on behalf of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko for their exceptional service to the country and its people.
Diaries
In November 2009, Jones' diaries recording the man-made genocide of the Great Soviet Famine of 1932–33 went on display for the first time in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge.