Excerpt
revealing Famine Conditions from Gareth's Diary for 21st March 1933
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Here for a more detailed photo and transcript of this page from Gareth's
Diary notes
On
the 29th March Gareth issued a press release to a colleague of Gareth's,
H. Knickerbocker of The New York Evening Post, two days after
arriving in Berlin, which was then circulated amongst the Press Corps
and published around the world.
Evening
Post Foreign Service New York 1933
Famine
grips Russia Millions Dying. Idle on Rise, Says Briton
Gareth
Jones, Lloyd George Aid, Reports Devastation
TOURS
FARM AREAS, FINDS FOOD GONE
Asserts Reds Arrest British to Check Public Wrath-Peasants. “Wait for
Death”
BERLIN,
March. 29th , - Russia today is in the grip of a famine which is proving
as disastrous as the catastrophe of 1921 when millions died, reported
Gareth Jones, Foreign Affairs secretary to former Prime Minister David
Lloyd George of Great Britain, who arrived in Berlin this morning en
route to London after a long walking tour through the Ukraine and other
districts in the Soviet Union.
Mr. Jones, who speaks Russian fluently, is the first foreigner to visit
the Russian countryside since the Moscow authorities forbade foreign
correspondents to leave the city. His report, which he will
deliver to the Royal Institute of International Affairs tomorrow,
explains the reason for this prohibition. Famine on a colossal
scale, impending death of millions From hunger, murderous terror and the
beginnings of serious unemployment in a land that had hitherto prided
itself on the fact that every man had a job - this is the summary of Mr.
Jones’s first-hand observations.
He
told the EVENING POST: “The arrest of the British engineers in Moscow
is a symbol of panic in consequence of conditions worse than in 1921.
Millions are dying of hunger. The trial, beginning Saturday, of
the British engineers is merely a pendant to the recent shooting of
thirty-five prominent workers in agriculture, including the
Vice-Commissar of the Ministry of Agriculture, and is an attempt to
check the popular wrath at the famine which haunts every district of the
Soviet Union.
"Everywhere
was the cry, ‘There is no bread. We are dying. This cry
came from every part of Russia, from the Volga,. Siberia, White Russia,
the North Caucasus, Central Asia. I tramped through the black
earth region because that was once the richest farm land 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. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again
grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided. I stayed
overnight in a village where there used to be 200 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.
“A
foreign expert returning from Kazakstan told me that 1,000,000 out of
5,000,000 there have died of hunger. I can believe it. After
Stalin, the most hated man in Russia is Bernard Shaw among those
who read his glowing descriptions of plentiful food in their starving
land. “The future is blacker than the present. There is
insufficient seed. Many peasants are too weak physically to work
on the land. The new taxation policy, promising to take only a
fixed amount of grain from the peasants, will fail to encourage
production because the peasants refuse to trust the Government.”
In short, Mr. Jones concluded, the collectivization policy of the
Government and the resistance of the peasants to it have brought Russia
to the worst catastrophe since the famine of 1921 and have swept away
the population of whole districts.
Coupled
with this, the prime reason for the breakdown, he added, is the terror,
lack of skill and collapse of transport and finance. Unemployment
is rapidly increasing, he declared, because of the lack of raw
materials. The lack of food and the ‘wrecking of the currency
and credit system have forced many of the factories to close or to
dismiss great numbers of workers.
The
Jones report, because of his position, because of his reputation for
reliability and impartiality and because he is the only first-hand
observer who has visited the Russian countryside since it was officially
closed to foreigners, is bound to receive widespread attention in
official England as well as among the public of the country.
