Gareth Jones (journalist)

Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones (13 August 1905 – 12 August 1935) was a Welsh journalist who in March 1933 first reported in the Western world, without equivocation and under his own name, the existence of the Soviet famine of 1932–1933, including the Holodomor.

Jones graduated from the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1926 with a first-class honours degree in French.

He also studied at the University of Strasbourg and at Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1929 with another first in French, German, and Russian.

After his death, one of his tutors, Hugh Fraser Stewart, wrote in The Times that Jones had been an "extraordinary linguist".

At Cambridge he was active in the Cambridge University League of Nations Union, serving as its assistant secretary.

In 1929, Jones became a professional freelance reporter, and by 1930 was submitting articles to a variety of newspapers and journals.

After graduating, Jones taught languages briefly at Cambridge, and then in January 1930 was hired as Foreign Affairs Adviser to the British MP and former prime minister David Lloyd George, thanks to an introduction by Thomas Jones.

The post involved preparing notes and briefings Lloyd George could use in debates, articles, and speeches, and also included some travel abroad.

He had reported the findings of each trip in his published journalism, including three articles titled "The Two Russias" he published anonymously in The Times in 1930, and three increasingly explicit articles, also anonymous, titled "The Real Russia" in The Times in October 1931 which reported the starvation of peasants in Soviet Ukraine and Southern Russia.

By 1932, Jones had been to the Soviet Union twice, for three weeks in the summer of 1930 and for a month in the summer of 1931.

Jones had reported anonymously in The Times in 1931 on starvation in Soviet Ukraine and Southern Russia, and, after his third visit to the Soviet Union, issued a press release under his own name in Berlin on 29 March 1933 describing the widespread famine in detail.

Reports by Malcolm Muggeridge, writing in 1933 as an anonymous correspondent, appeared contemporaneously in the Manchester Guardian; his first anonymous article specifying famine in the Soviet Union was published on 25 March 1933.

Born in Barry, Glamorgan, Jones attended Barry County School, where his father, Major Edgar Jones, was headmaster until around 1933.

His mother, Annie Gwen Jones, had worked in Ukraine as a tutor to the children of Arthur Hughes, son of Welsh steel industrialist John Hughes, who founded the town of Hughesovka (modern-day Donetsk) in eastern Ukraine.

In late January and early February 1933, Jones was in Germany covering the accession to power of the Nazi Party, and was in Leipzig on the day Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor.

A few days later on 23 February in the Richthofen, "the fastest and most powerful three-motored aeroplane in Germany", Jones became one of the first foreign journalists to fly with Hitler as he accompanied Hitler and Joseph Goebbels to Frankfurt where he reported for the Western Mail on the new Chancellor's tumultuous acclamation in that city.

He wrote in the Welsh Western Mail that if the Richthofen had crashed the history of Europe would have changed.

In March 1933, he visited the Soviet Union for a third and final time and on 10 March was able to travel to the Ukrainian SSR, due to an invitation from Oscar Ehrt, Vice Consul at the German Consulate in Kharkov.

The Vice Consul's son, Adolf Ehrt, was a leading Nazi propagandist who became head of Goebbels’ Anti-Komintern agency.

Jones got off the train 40 miles before his declared destination and walked across the border from the Russian SSR.

As he walked he kept diaries of the man-made starvation he witnessed.

On his return to Berlin on 29 March, he issued his press release, which was published by many newspapers, including The Manchester Guardian and the New York Evening Post:"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, and 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 two hundred 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."

This report was denounced by Moscow-resident American journalist Walter Duranty, who had been obscuring the truth in order to please the dictatorial Soviet regime.

On 31 March, The New York Times published a denial of Jones's statement by Duranty under the headline "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving".

Duranty called Jones' report "a big scare story".

Historian Timothy Snyder has written that "Duranty's claim that there was 'no actual starvation' but only 'widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition' echoed Soviet usages and pushed euphemism into mendacity. This was an Orwellian distinction; and indeed George Orwell himself regarded the Ukrainian famine of 1933 as a central example of a black truth that artists of language had covered with bright colors."

In Duranty's article, Kremlin sources denied the existence of a famine; part of The New York Times' headline was: "Russian and Foreign Observers in Country See No Ground for Predictions of Disaster."

On 11 April 1933, Jones published a detailed analysis of the famine in the Financial News, pointing out its main causes: forced collectivization of private farms, removal of 6–7 millions of "best workers" (the Kulaks) from their land, forced requisitions of grain and farm animals and increased "export of foodstuffs" from USSR.

After being banned from re-entering the Soviet Union, Jones was kidnapped and murdered in 1935 while investigating in Japanese-occupied Inner Mongolia; his murder is suspected by some to have been committed by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.

Upon his death, former British prime minister David Lloyd George said, "He had a passion for finding out what was happening in foreign lands wherever there was trouble, and in pursuit of his investigations he shrank from no risk. … Nothing escaped his observation, and he allowed no obstacle to turn from his course when he thought that there was some fact, which he could obtain. He had the almost unfailing knack of getting at things that mattered."