Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones (13 August 1905 – 12 August 1935) was a Welsh journalist who in March 1933 first reported in the Western world, without equivocation and under his own name, the existence of the Soviet famine of 1930–1933, including the Holodomor and the Asharshylyk.
Jones had reported anonymously in The Times in 1931 on starvation in both Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine. After his third visit to the Soviet Union, he issued a press release under his own name in Berlin on 29 March 1933 describing the widespread famine in detail. Reports by Malcolm Muggeridge, writing in 1933 as an anonymous correspondent, appeared contemporaneously in the Manchester Guardian;"The Price of Russia's 'Plan': Virtual Breakdown of Agriculture". From our Moscow Correspondent. The Manchester Guardian. 12 January 1933, pp. 9–10. The "Moscow correspondent" was Malcolm Muggeridge. "The Soviet and the Peasantry. An Observer's Notes. I: Famine in North Caucasus". The Manchester Guardian. 25 March 1933, pp. 13–14. (Again, the "Observer" was Muggeridge. This and the following two articles were smuggled out of Russia in a diplomatic bag.) "The Soviet and the Peasantry. An Observer's Notes. II: Hunger in the Ukraine". The Manchester Guardian. 27 March 1933, pp. 9–10. "The Soviet and the Peasantry. An Observer's Notes. III: Poor Harvest in Prospect". The Manchester Guardian. 28 March 1933, pp. 9–10. his first anonymous article specifying famine in the Soviet Union was published on 25 March 1933.
After being banned from re-entering the Soviet Union, Jones journeyed to the Far East to report on the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Ignoring warnings from the British Embassy of their presence, he was kidnapped by Chinese bandits and murdered in 1935 while investigating in Japanese-occupied Inner Mongolia; his murder is suspected by some to be the work of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. Upon his death, former British prime minister David Lloyd George said, "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. … 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."
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 today's eastern 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"Mr. Gareth Jones: Journalist and Linguist". The Times. 17 August 1935. Issue 47145, p. 12. 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".Stewart, H. F. (19 August 1935). "Mr. Gareth Jones". The Times. Issue 47146, p. 15. At Cambridge he was active in the Cambridge University League of Nations Union, serving as its assistant secretary.
Career Teaching; adviser to Lloyd George After graduating, Jones taught languages briefly at Cambridge, and then in January 1930 was hired as Foreign Affairs Adviser to the British MP and former prime minister David Lloyd George, thanks to an introduction by Thomas Jones. The post involved preparing notes and briefings Lloyd George could use in debates, articles, and speeches, and also included some travel abroad.
Journalism In 1929, Jones became a professional freelance reporter, and by 1930 he was submitting articles to a variety of newspapers and journals.
Germany In late January and some of February 1933, Jones was in Germany covering the accession to power of the Nazi Party, and he was in Leipzig on the day Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Some three weeks later, on 23 February in the Richthofen, "the fastest and most powerful three-motored aeroplane in Germany", Jones, along with Sefton Delmer, became the first foreign journalists, after he became Chancellor, to fly with Hitler. They accompanied Hitler and Joseph Goebbels to Frankfurt where Jones 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 be changed.
Soviet Union
By 1932, Jones had been to the Soviet Union twice, for three weeks in the summer of 1930 and for a month in the summer of 1931. He had reported the findings of each trip in his published articles, including three articles titled "The Two Russias" he published anonymously in The Times in 1930, and three increasingly explicit articles, also anonymous, titled "The Real Russia" in The Times in October 1931, which reported on starvation among Russian peasants along the Volga River and German colonists near Dnieperstroy in Soviet Ukraine.
In March 1933, he travelled to the Soviet Union for a third time. On 10th March, he left Moscow for the Russian Black Earth District, south of Belogorod, and the Kharkov district of the Ukrainian SSR, on a journey made possible by an invitation from Oscar Ehrt, Vice Consul at the German Consulate in Kharkov. The Vice Consul's son, Adolf Ehrt, was a leading Nazi propagandist who became head of Goebbels’ Anti-Komintern agency. Jones got off the train 40 miles before his declared destination and walked across the border from the Russian SFSR. As he walked he kept diaries of the starvation he witnessed. On his return to Berlin on 29 March, he issued a 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 are now 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 denounced by Moscow-resident British journalist Walter Duranty, who had been obscuring the truth to please the Soviet regime. On 31 March, The New York Times published on page 13 of its paper a denial of Jones's statement by Duranty under the headline "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving". Duranty called Jones's report "a big scare story".
Historian Timothy Snyder has written 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."
Duranty's article claimed, citing multiple Soviet and foreign sources, "there is no famine"; part of The New York Times headline was: "Russian and Foreign Observers in Country See No Ground for Predictions of Disaster."
On 11 April 1933, Jones published a detailed analysis of the famine in the Financial News, pointing out 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, for which he wrote "it is not so much the Soviet Government as the world crisis, which is to blame". He wrote: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 1929–30 that collectivisation of agriculture would be the nemesis of Communism has come absolutely true.On 13 May, The New York Times published a strong rebuttal of Duranty by 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. After his Soviet articles, Jones took up his new job in Cardiff on the Western Mail covering "arts, crafts and coracles", according to his great-nephew Nigel Linsan Colley. Yet he managed to get an interview with the owner of nearby St Donat's Castle, the American press magnate William Randolph Hearst. Hearst published Jones's account of what had happened in Ukraine – as he did for the almost identical eye-witness testimony of the disillusioned American Communist Fred Beal. Hearst also arranged for Jones to undertake a lecture and broadcast tour of the US.
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 there, he travelled to Inner Mongolia where he secured an interview with Inner Mongolian independence leader Demchugdongrub (Prince De). He continued his journey to Dolonor close to the border of Japanese-occupied Manchukuo in the company of a German journalist, Herbert Müller. Detained by Japanese forces there, the pair were told that there were three routes back to the Chinese town of Kalgan, only one of which was safe.
Kidnapping and death