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officially
closed to foreigners, was bound to receive widespread attention in official
England as well as among the public of the country. The following day, March 30th 1933 in the New York Times, Walter Duranty, a U.S. correspondent, and 1932 Pulitzer Prize Winner, long in Soviet good graces, denied there was famine and promptly presented a rebuttal, but it was a rebuttal of classic Orwellian ‘doublespeak’: It is all too true that the novelty and mismanagement of collective farming, plus the quite efficient conspiracy of Feodor M. Konar and his associates in agricultural commissariats, have made a mess of Soviet food production. [Konar was executed for sabotage.] But - to put it brutally - you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and the Bolshevist leaders are just as indifferent to the casualties that may be involved in their drive toward socialization as any General during the World War.[One] . . . Since I talked with Mr. Jones I have made exhaustive inquiries about this alleged famine situation. . . . There is serious food shortage throughout the country with occasional cases of well-managed state or collective farms. The big cities and the army are adequately supplied with food. There is no actual starvation or death from starvation, but there is widespread is mortality from diseases due to malnutrition. . . . In every Russian village food conditions will improve henceforth, but that will not answer one really vital question - What about the coming grain crop? Upon that depends not the future of the Soviet power which cannot and will not be smashed, but the future policy of the Kremlin. The New York Times on May 13th, 1933 then printed a reply from ‘Mr. Jones’ to Walter Duranty’s article of March 30th in which Gareth, in a letter to the newspaper said he stood by his statement that the Soviet Union was suffering from a severe famine. The 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 Jones’ evidence was based on conversations with peasants who had migrated into the towns from various parts of Russia. Peasants from the richest parts of the U.S.S.R. were coming into the towns for bread. They told stories of the deaths in their villages from starvation, of the death of the greater part of their cattle and horses and each conversation corroborated the previous one. He talked with hundreds of peasants who were not “kulaks” - those mythical scapegoats for the hunger in Russia - but ordinary peasants. He talked with them alone in Russian and jotted down their conversations, which were an unanswerable indictment of Soviet agricultural policy of Collectivisation. These peasants said emphatically that the famine was worse than in 1921 and that fellow-villagers were dying. |
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