Gareth Jones [bas relief by Oleh Lesiuk]
BOOKS
TOPICAL
GENERAL
| Reports Russians Are Starving- - - - - Lloyd George’s
Secretary Tells of Visit to Ukraine - Says Terrorism Is Rife.
- - - - - Special
Wireless Dispatch to The Sun.
BERLIN.
March 29 [1933]— The present Russian famine is as bad as the great starvation
of 1921, when millions died, according to Gareth Jones, private secretary to
David Lloyd George, former British Prime Minister, who just reached here today
after a long walking trip through the rural districts of the Ukraine. Mr. Jones will deliver an official report in London to the Royal Institute of International Affairs tomorrow explaining the conditions in Russia and the reasons underlying them. He speaks Russian fluently and, while all foreign correspondents mostly were forbidden to visit the famine regions of the Ukraine, Jones was allowed to do so. His
report explains the dislike of the Russian authorities to having conditions in
the Soviet investigated. Mr.
Jones saw famine on a huge scale and the revival of a murderous terror. The
Russians are thoroughly alarmed over this situation and, he explains, the arrest
of British engineers recently as a “maniac measure” following the shooting
by the Government of 35 prominent Russian agricultural workers, including a
vice-commissar in the ministry of agriculture. Visited Collective
Farms
“I walked through the country visiting villages and investigating twelve collective farms,” Mr. Jones today told The Sun correspondent. Everywhere I heard the cry: ‘There
is no bread: we are dying!’ This cry is rising from all parts of Russia:
from the Volga district, from Siberia, from White Russia, from Central Asia and
from the Ukraine black dirt country. I saw a peasant pick up a crust of
bread and an orange peel which I had thrown away in the train. “Soldiers
warned me against travelling by night, as there were too many desperate men
about. A foreign expert who returned from Kazakstan told me that 1,000,000
out of the 5,000.000 of inhabitants there have died of hunger. Hatred of Shaw.
“After
Dictator Josef V. Stalin the starving Russians most hate George Bernard Shaw for
his accounts of their plentiful food, whereas they are really starving.
There is insufficient feed and many peasants are too weak to work the land and
the future prospect seems blacker than the present. The peasants no longer
trust their Government and the change in the taxation policy came too late.” Mr.
Jones attributes the famine chiefly to the collectivization policy and the
peasants’ hatred for it. Other causes are bad transportation, the lack
of skilled labor, the bad State finances and Governmental terror.
Unemployment is steadily growing in the land that but a few years ago boasted of
its freedom from ills current in capitalistic society.
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