Gareth
visits the U.S.S.R. and Ukraine
******
Careful about what he wrote in his letters home from
the Soviet Union, on his return to Berlin, Gareth immediately gave
his famous press release on the 29th of March 1933 and
this was printed in many American and British newspapers including
the New York Evening Post[i]and
the Manchester Guardian. The article in the New York
Evening Post was entitled “Famine Gripping Russia, Millions
Dying, Idle on the rise says Briton”.
Gareth had taken an unaccompanied journey through
north Ukraine and wrote “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.
Two days later March 31st 1933 there was
a rebuttal by Walter Duranty to Gareth in the New York Times
.
Gareth replied by letter to the New York Times
on May 13th refuting the article of Walter Duranty who had stated
that there was no famine and death.
“The Soviet censors had turned the journalists into
masters of euphemism and understatement and hence they gave
‘famine’ the polite name of ‘food shortage’ and starving to death
was softened to read as ‘widespread mortality’ from diseases due to
malnutrition’…
“Gareth congratulated the Soviet Foreign Office on
its skill in concealing the true situation in the U.S.S.R.”
On Gareth’s return from the Soviet Union he published
at least 20 articles in the Western Mail, the Financial
News and the Daily Express. His last article was
“Goodbye Russia” in the London Daily Express, but he
published no further articles after April 20th in Britain.
Gareth must have offended Lloyd George in the letter
that he wrote immediately he arrived in Berlin on March 27th
stating that “The situation is so grave, so much worse than in 1921
that I am amazed at your admiration for Stalin.”
A telegram was sent to the Soviet Embassy by Maxim
Litvinoff, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs which accused
Gareth of espionage. He was also placed on the Black List of the
O.G.P.U. the Soviet Secret Police indicting many crimes to his
name. Was it a coincident that Sylvester was called to the Soviet
Embassy at 12 o’clock on April 8th by the Ambassador
Maisky. Ll.G. was a friend of the Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky as
well as Litivinoff.
Following this Gareth appeared to be ostracized by
the British establishment and never to appeared to be contacted by
Lloyd George again. Gareth was banned from the U.S.S.R. This must
have been a bitter disappointment to him as he was unable to return
to a country about which he knew a great deal, and had spent so much
time studying her literature, history and language.
The Moscow Correspondents had called Gareth liar, but
he never survived long enough to be vindicated by Eugene Lyons in
his book Assignment in Utopia.[ii]
Eugene Lyons describes how Gareth Jones’ portrayal of the
shocking situation in Soviet Russia and Ukraine was denied.
“Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us
in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes”.
H.R
Knickerbocker, ‘Famine Grips Russia, Millions Dying, Idle on
Increase, Says Briton’, New York Evening Post, March 29, 1933
[ii]Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, Harcourt Brace, New
York, 1937, p.576.