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Countering
Walter Duranty’s rebuttal in the New York Times, Gareth Jones congratulated
the Soviet Foreign Office on its skill in concealing the true situation in the
U. S. S. R.. “Moscow is not
Russia, and the sight of well-fed people there tends to hide the real Russia.” In Eugene Lyons’ 1937 book Assignment in Utopiaii, written after his disillusionment with the Great Soviet Socialist Experiment, he describes how Gareth Jones’ portrayal of the shocking situation in Soviet Russia and Ukraine was publicly denied by the Moscow Foreign Correspondents; even after they had had queries from their home offices on the subject of the famine. But these inquiries coincided with preparations that were under way for the show-trial of some six British engineers. The need to remain on friendly terms with the Soviet censors at least for the duration of the trial was a compelling professional necessity (and possibly professional jealousy). Persuaded by the head censor in the Bolshevik News Agency, Comrade Umansky, these correspondents were placed in position where they more or less had to condemn Gareth Jones as a liar. To quote Lyons: “Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes - but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials.”
Despite the adverse criticism, Gareth Jones went
on to write many articles about the plight of the Soviet peasants and in
particular that of the Ukrainians in many British, American, French and German
newspapers to tell the world of the famine and terror that he had seen on his
travels. Even he narrowly escaped
arrest at a small railway station in Ukraine.
In the Daily Express of April 5th 1933 Gareth wrote of his
journey to Ukraine:
I piled my rucksack with many loaves of white bread, with butter, cheese, meat and chocolate which I had bought with foreign currency at the Torgsin stores. I arrived at the station in Moscow from which the trains leave for the south, picked my way through the dirty peasants lying sleeping on the floor and in a few minutes found myself it the hard class compartment of the slowest train which leaves Moscow for Kharkoff . . . In every little station the train stops, and during one of these halts a man comes up to me and whispers to me in German: “Tell them in England that we are starving, and that we are getting swollen.” . . . The young Communist says to me: “Be careful. The Ukrainians are desperate.” But I get out of the train, which rattles on to Kharkoff, leaving me alone in snow. On April 6th he wrote: In one of the peasant’s cottages in which I stayed we slept nine in the room. It was pitiful to see that two out of the three children had swollen stomachs. All there was to eat in the hut was a very dirty watery soup, with a slice or two of potato, which all the family and in the family I included myself, ate from a common bowl with wooden spoons. ii Assignment in Utopia by Eugene Lyons. George G. Harrap, 1937 |
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