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OVERVIEW 1933
Before Gareth officially
left the employ of David Lloyd George he embarked on a journey of Europe
mainly to see for himself the situation in the continent and in particular
Germany followed by the Soviet Union. He was in Germany the day Adolf
Hitler was made Chancellor and then two weeks later flew with him in his
famous aeroplane the "Richthofen". With his usual energy he
travelled to the Soviet Union and after a few days in Moscow he left with
his knapsack full of food for the journey. He boarded a train hard class
to Ukraine so that he might meet the typical person en route to Ukraine.
In his press release he describes the train journey. On reaching his destination
he undertook his well known tramp through 20 villages and saw for himself
the tragedy of hunger and starvation. He spent a night in a cottage and
when he shared his white bread and butter and cheese one of the peasant
women said, "Now I have eaten such wonderful things I can die happy."
He set forth again further towards the south and heard the villagers say,
"We are waiting for death." Time and time again he heard the
cry: "There is no bread. We are dying."
Returning to Berlin from
the Soviet Union, Gareth Jones made 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 and the Manchester Guardian:
Photo
from Gareth's Cuttings book of his first signed article on the
famine from The London Evening Standard, 31st March 1933.
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"I walked along through
villages and twelve collective farms. 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
farmland 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."
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On the
31st of March the infamous denial of Jones' statement was made by Walter
Duranty in the New York Times stating there was no famine and these were
the headlines to that article RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING. Duranty
was their Marxist Foreign Correspondent on Moscow and the 1932 he was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Duranty maintained that the high death rate
was from diseases due to malnutrition, that the larger cities had food
and that it was Ukraine, North Caucasus and Lower Volga Regions that suffered
from shortages. He said the Kremlin denied the doom and that Russian and
Foreign Observers in the Soviet Union could see not grounds for the predications
of disaster. He went on to say that:
Mr.
Jones is a man of a keen and active mind, and he has taken the trouble
to learn Russian, which he speaks with considerable fluency, but the writer
thought Mr. Jones's judgment was somewhat hasty and asked him on what
it was based. It appeared that he had made a forty-mile walk through villages
in the neighbourhood of Kharkov and had found conditions sad. I suggested
that that was a rather inadequate cross-section of a big country but nothing
could shake his conviction of impending doom.
In Eugene Lyons' 1937 book
Assignment in Utopia, written after his disillusionment with the
Great Soviet Socialist Experiment, he describes how the Moscow Foreign
Correspondents publicly denied Gareth Jones' portrayal of the shocking
situation in Soviet Russia and Ukraine; even after they had had queries
from their home offices on the subject of the famine.
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."
On May 13th the New
York Times published a reply in a letter which Jones wrote saying
that he stood by every word he said:
While partially agreeing
with my Statement, he implied that my report was a "scare story"
and compared it with certain fantastic prophecies of Soviet downfall.
He also made the strange suggestion that I was forecasting the doom of
the Soviet régime, a forecast I have never ventured.
I stand by my statement
that Soviet Russia is suffering from a severe famine. It would be foolish
to draw this conclusion from my tramp through a small part of vast Russia,
although I must remind Mr. Duranty that it was my third visit to Russia,
that I devoted four years of university life to the study of the Russian
language and history and that on this occasion alone I visited in all
twenty villages, not only in the Ukraine, but also in the black earth
district, and in the Moscow region, and that I slept in peasants' cottages,
and did not immediately leave for the next village.
Following this Gareth was
to write many articles about the plight of the peasants in the Soviet
Union in British and American newspapers. M. Litvinoff, the Soviet Commissar
for Foreign Affairs, accused him of espionage in a letter to David Lloyd
George and banned Gareth from returning to the U.S.S.R. This was no doubt
a disappointment to Gareth as he was unable to return to a country about
which he had spent so much time studying her literature, history and language.
From 1933 to 1934, Gareth
was employed as a journalist and reporter to the Welsh newspaper, the
Western Mail. Not only in his articles did he write about Russia,
Germany, Ireland and unemployment, but he wrote about the craftsmen of
rural Wales in the 1930's; trades that have been largely lost to posterity.
His articles are a delight to read and after his death many were incorporated
in a small book entitled In Search of News, the proceeds of which went
towards a Travelling Scholarship. Today this scholarship is still being
awarded to graduates of the University of Wales.
In October 1934, Gareth
left Britain on a 'Round the World Fact Finding Tour'. He spent three
months in the United States and during the time there he visited Wales,
Wisconsin where he had the privilege of interviewing Frank Lloyd Wright.
But Gareth's main reason for the tour was to visit the Far East, this
area being an enigma to the western world. Gareth intended to investigate
the Japanese designs of expansion in the Far East and in particular with
relation to northern China and Manchukuo. Five or six weeks were spent
in Japan where he interviewed a number of Japanese politicians who were
influencing world events. Previous to arriving in China he visited many
countries in the Far East including the Philippines, Dutch East Indies,
Singapore, Siam, French Indo-China and Hong Kong before he reached Beijing
and in each place he called on the Japanese Consuls. He enquired from
the ex-patriots their views on the current political situation in relation
to Japan's intentions. On arrival in Beijing, Gareth received from Baron
von Plessen an invitation to attend the meeting of the Mongol Princes
and to meet the pro-Japanese Prince Teh Wang. The baron returned to Beijing
leaving Gareth in the company of a German, Dr. Herbert Müller to
travel in Inner Mongolia believing it to be free of bandits. They ventured
into territory that had been had infiltrated by Japanese a few days earlier
and where the pair found troops were massing. They were apprehended by
the Japanese military for some hours, but when released they were informed
that there were three ways back to the Chinese town of Kalgan, one of
which was safe. Taking this route on the following day they were captured
by bandits and held for ransom for 100,000 Mexican dollars. The German
was released within two days, but after 16 days in captivity, the bandits,
disbanded Chinese soldiers whose families may have been held to ransom
by the Japanese murdered Gareth.
Gareth Jones' death on
the eve of his thirtieth birthday was a tragic loss not only to his family
but to the world and society as a whole. He had revealed to the world
the terrible famine in the Soviet Union and Ukraine; he predicted the
Second World War in Europe would breakout following the Danzig Corridor
dispute and the designs of territorial expansion by the Japanese would
bring about a conflagration in the Far East.
To quote David Lloyd George:
"Mr. Gareth Jones knew too much."
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