Home

Gareth Jones Books

Gareth Jones

Childhood

Colley Family

My Hobbies

Siriol's Photos

Earl of Abergavenny

The Land Girl in 1917

All Articles of interest

 

Gareth Jones  Lloyd George

 

Major Edgar Jones

Sharm el Sheikh

Book Purchase

Links

Contact Address

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[1][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”.

 

[1] 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.

 

 

Copyright reserved 2009