There is No Bread - We are Dying

Gareth Jones issued a press release in Berlin on the 29th March 1933.

‘I walked through the country visiting villages and investigating twelve collective farms. Everywhere I heard the cry, ‘there is no bread, we are dying.’ The cry came from every part of Russia; from the Volga, White Russia and 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. 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.’

To read the New York Evening Post's reporting of Gareth's press release 'Famine Grips Russia, Millions Dying', then please CLICK HERE.