The Truth about the Great Famine

Ukraine 1931–1934

Abstract

Starting from the Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s film, Mr Jones, The Truth that can’t be hidden forever, this article is the result of an extensive reading of the articles and notebooks of Gareth Jones, a valiant young Welsh journalist who, in 1931, after interviewing Hitler, sets out to interview Stalin. But, when he arrived in Moscow, with a recommendation letter from Lloyd George, he discovered, with the help of a colleague’s confidence, that a severe famine was occurring in Ukraine, and that the regime and nearly all the Western journalists appointed in the USSR were doing their utmost to conceal it.

Gareth’s articles and note-books reveal appalling details of this famine, which was organized to export as much grain as possible. He joined the starving peasants and experienced the famine and its first effects himself. Gareth Jones was then captured by the secret services who offered him a deal : Gareth Jones was released and could return to England, but he had to refute the 'false rumours', otherwise six English engineers who had been specially arrested and charged with espionage would be sentenced.

This article analyzes the process of the Stalinian taboo, and its relaying by Western press just after Jones has proclaimed the truth about the Famine, (and, two years later, has been killed in Manchuria, probably as a vengeance). Then, this article shows the slow progression of studies on this frightening episode of a provoked famine. First, the obstinate cover-up, set up by the American journalist and Pullizer Prize winner in 1932, Walter Duranty, will be studied. Then, the slow progress of knowledge on this period will be examined, from the work of Boris Souvarine and his Stalin (1935) to the research of Robert Conquest published in Harvest of Sorrow (1986), to end with Anne Applebaum's latest book, Red Famine(2017), which raises the question, among others : Does the Great Famine in Ukraine correspond to the crime of genocide?

Today, Gareth Jones’s role is recognized in independent Ukraine, and his niece, author of a book called Gareth Jones, the Manchukuo Incident, published in 1999, has received on his behalf the posthumous Ukrainian Order of Merit.