Gareth Jones
[bas relief by Oleh Lesiuk]
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'Are you Listening NYT?' U.N. Speech - Nov 2009 |
Gareth Recognised at Cambridge - Nov 2009 |
Reporter and the Genocide - Rome, March 2009 |
Order of Freedom Award -Nov 2008 |
Premiere of 'The Living' Documentary Kyiv - Nov 2008 |
Gareth Jones 'Famine' Diaries - Chicago 2008 |
Aberystwyth Memorial Plaque 2006 |
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Mr. A. O. Sulzberger, Jr,
The New York Times Company
229 West 43d Street
New York, NY 10036
24th October 2003
Dear Mr. Sulzberger,
Re: "Times Should Lose Pulitzer From 30s, Consultant to Paper Says," 23 October 2003, The New York Times, by Jacques Steinberg
May I add weight to Prof Lubomyr Luciuk' s letter to you to gracefully return the ‘lost’ Pulitzer Prize awarded to Walter Duranty in 1932. My uncle, Gareth Jones was the 'Mr Jones' who was so vilified in the Duranty article published in your paper on March 31st 1933. In this article Duranty denied there was famine stating that: "There is no actual starvation or death from starvation, but there is wide is mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." In my uncle's reply to your then editor, published on May 13th 1933, Gareth Jones considered Moscow journalists to be “masters of euphemism and understatement”. Gareth Jones could not have been any more forthright by signing-off his letter: “May I in conclusion congratulate 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”.
Gareth Jones, a first-class honours graduate of Russian and German from Cambridge University, later acted as a foreign affairs advisor to Lloyd George, visited the Soviet Union in 1930, 1931 and 1933 and was no stranger to the country. Indeed unlike the reporting of Walter Duranty, whom Gareth met four times, he was well aware as early as August 1930 of the of the terrible plight of the Ukrainians, and he wrote from Berlin to his parents on August 26th 1930 the following letter (A scan of the original hand-written document may be viewed at: http://www.garethjones.org/soviet_articles/gareth_1930.htm ):
"Hurray! It is wonderful to be in Germany again, absolutely wonderful. Russia is in a very bad state; rotten, no food, only bread; oppression, injustice, misery among the workers and 90% discontented. I saw some very bad things, which made me mad to think that people like [ther Webbs] go there and come back, after having been led round by the nose and had enough to eat, and say that Russia is a paradise. In the South there is talk of a new revolution, but it will never come off, because the Army and the O.G.P.U. (Soviet Police) are too strong. The winter is going to be one of great suffering there and there is starvation. The government is the most brutal in the world. The peasants hate the Communists. This year thousands and thousands of the best men in Russia have been sent to Siberia and the prison island of Solovki. People are now speaking openly against the Government. In the Donetz Basin conditions are unbearable.
One reason why I left Hughesovska [Donetsk today] so quickly was that all I could get to eat was a roll of bread –and that is all I had up to 7 o’clock. Many Russians are too weak to work. I am terribly sorry for them. They cannot strike or they are shot or sent to Siberia. There are heaps of enemies of the Communist within the country.
Nevertheless great strides have been made in many industries and there is a good chance that when the Five-Year Plan is over Russia may become prosperous. But before that there will be great suffering, many riots and many deaths.”
In view of the fact that Walter Duranty must have known the true state of affairs in Ukraine in 1930 and by his denial of the famine as ‘Stalin's Apologist’, then I totally support the campaign requesting you to return his Pulitzer in the name of my uncle, Gareth Jones and all those who sadly perished in the Holodomor of 1932-1933.
Yours sincerely
Margaret Siriol Colley
Dr Margaret Siriol Colley, M.B., Ch. B., D.R.C.O.G.
Nigel Colley, B.Sc.
3,Manor Court,
Bramcote,
Notts, NG9 3DR
U.K.
P.S. There is an extensive website dedicated to Gareth Jones who was tragically murdered in 1935, by politically-controlled bandits in Inner Mongolia whilst ‘In Search Of News’ and you may be interested in discover further details of his truthful Soviet reporting at www.colley.co.uk/garethjones .
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