Gareth Jones
[bas relief by Oleh Lesiuk]
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The
Morning Post. March 30th 1933
[This Newspaper was later merged with the London Daily Telegraph.]
RUSSIA
IN GRIP OF FAMINE
Death
and Despair Stalk the Land
EVIDENCE
AT FIRST HAND
“There
Is No Bread: We Are Dying”
BERLIN,
March 29. [1933]
“Russia
today is in the grip of famine, which is proving as disastrous as the
catastrophe of 1921, when millions died,” said Mr. Gareth Jones Former
Political Secretary of Mr. Lloyd George, when he arrived in Berlin this morning
en route for London. He had been on a long walking trip through the
Ukraine and other districts of the Soviet Union.
Mr.
Jones, who speaks Russian fluently, was the first foreigner to visit the Russian
countryside since the Moscow authorities forbade foreign correspondents to leave
the city. His report which will be delivered to the Institute of
International Affairs to-morrow, explains the reason for this s prohibition.
In
an interview with the New York Evening Post, “Mr. Jones said that famine on a
colossal scale was impending. It meant death to millions by hunger, and
the beginnings of serious unemployment in a land which has hitherto prided
itself of every man having a job. The arrest of the British engineers in
Moscow is a symbol of panic and is a consequence of worse than in 1921 when
millions died of hunger,” declared Mr. Jones. The trial beginning on
Saturday of British engineers is merely a sequel to the recent shooting of
thirty-five prominent agricultural workers, including the Vice-Commissar in the
Ministry of Agriculture, in an attempt to cheek the popular wrath at the famine
which haunts every district of the Soviet Union.
“I
walked alone through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere
was the cry, ‘There is no bread; we are dying!’. This cry came to me
from every part of Russia.
“In
a train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung into the
spittoon a crust of bread I had been eating from my own supply. The
peasant, my fellow passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw
orange peel into the peasant again grabbed and devoured it. The Communist
subsided.
A
MILLION DEAD
“A
foreign expert returning from Kazakstan told me that a million out of five
million have died of hunger. I can believe it. “After Stalin, the
most hated man in Russia is Bernard Shaw. To many of those who can read
and have read his glaring descriptions of plentiful food in their starving laud
the future is blacker than the present.
“
There is insufficient seed. Many of the peasants are too weak to work the
land. The new taxation policy which promised 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, concluded Mr. Jones, the Government’s policy of collectivisation and
the peasants’ resistance to it had brought Russia to the worst catastrophe
since the famine of 1921 swept away the population of entire districts.
Coupled
with this, the prime reason for the breakdown was the lack of skilled labour and
the collapse of transport and finance.
Reuters
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