Gareth Jones

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 1930–1933, including the Holodomor and the Asharshylyk.

Jones had reported anonymously in The Times in 1931 on starvation in both Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine. his first anonymous article specifying famine in the Soviet Union was published on 25 March 1933.

After being banned from re-entering the Soviet Union, Jones journeyed to the Far East to report on the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Ignoring warnings from the British Embassy of their presence, he was kidnapped by Chinese bandits and murdered in 1935 while investigating in Japanese-occupied Inner Mongolia; his murder is suspected by some to be the work of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.

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

Journalism In 1929, Jones became a professional freelance reporter,

Germany In late January and some of February 1933, Jones was in Germany covering the accession to power of the Nazi Party, and he was in Leipzig on the day Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Some three weeks later, on 23 February in the Richthofen, "the fastest and most powerful three-motored aeroplane in Germany", Jones, along with Sefton Delmer, became the first foreign journalists, after he became Chancellor, to fly with Hitler. They accompanied Hitler and Joseph Goebbels to Frankfurt where Jones reported for the Western Mail on the new Chancellor's tumultuous acclamation in that city. He wrote that if the Richthofen had crashed the history of Europe would be changed.

Soviet Union

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. 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 SFSR. As he walked he kept diaries of the starvation he witnessed. On his return to Berlin on 29 March, he issued a press release, which was published by many newspapers, including The Manchester Guardian and the New York Evening Post:

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

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."

Duranty's article claimed, citing multiple Soviet and foreign sources, "there is no famine"; part of The New York Times headline was: "Russian and Foreign Observers in Country See No Ground for Predictions of Disaster."

On 13 May, The New York Times published a strong rebuttal of Duranty by Jones, who stood by his report:

In a personal letter from Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov (whom Jones had interviewed while in Moscow) to Lloyd George, Jones was informed that he was banned from ever visiting the Soviet Union again. After his Soviet articles, Jones took up his new job in Cardiff on the Western Mail covering "arts, crafts and coracles", according to his great-nephew Nigel Linsan Colley. Yet he managed to get an interview with the owner of nearby St Donat's Castle, the American press magnate William Randolph Hearst. Hearst published Jones's account of what had happened in Ukraine – as he did for the almost identical eye-witness testimony of the disillusioned American Communist Fred Beal. Hearst also arranged for Jones to undertake a lecture and broadcast tour of the US.

Japan and China

Banned from the Soviet Union, Jones turned his attention to the Far East and in late 1934 he left Britain on a "Round-the-World Fact-Finding Tour". He spent about six weeks in Japan, interviewing important generals and politicians, and he eventually reached Beijing. From there, he travelled to Inner Mongolia where he secured an interview with Inner Mongolian independence leader Demchugdongrub (Prince De). He continued his journey to Dolonor close to the border of Japanese-occupied Manchukuo in the company of a German journalist, Herbert Müller. Detained by Japanese forces there, the pair were told that there were three routes back to the Chinese town of Kalgan, only one of which was safe. Müller was released after two days to arrange for the ransom to be paid. On 1 August, Jones's father received a telegram: "Well treated. Expect release soon." On 5 August, The Times reported that the kidnappers had moved Jones to an area southeast of Kuyuan and were now asking for 10,000 Chinese dollars (about £800), On 8 August, the news came that the first group of kidnappers had handed him over to a second group, and the ransom had increased to 100,000 Chinese dollars again. The Chinese and Japanese governments both made an effort to contact the kidnappers.

On 17 August 1935, The Times reported that the Chinese authorities had found Jones's body the previous day with three bullet wounds. The authorities believed that he had been killed on 12 August, the day before his 30th birthday. There is a suspicion among some that his murder had been engineered by the Soviet NKVD, as revenge for the embarrassment he had caused the Soviet regime.

Shanxi historians Li Xin and Sun Yuxin argued that the suspicious aspect of Jones’s kidnapping lay in the fact that the kidnappers did not prioritize monetary gain, unlike most groups who kidnapped foreigners, and that according to contemporary reports, the German journalist , who was traveling with Jones, was not abducted or forced to flee on horseback but was instead released unconditionally.

By 2002, historians learned from declassified British intelligence files that Müller had another identity: he was an intelligence agent for the Soviet NKVD. British security services maintained a dedicated intelligence file on Müller from 1917 to 1951. Müller had already attracted special attention from the British military attaché in China between 1927 and 1928, and in 1934 British authorities discovered that Müller had used the alias “Gordon” in Hankou(Hankow). Meanwhile, the German firm in Zhangjiakou(Kalgan) that provided transportation for Jones and Müller—Wostwag (West-Osteuropäische Warenaustausch A-G)—was a front company established by the Fourth Department (Intelligence) of the Soviet Red Army General Staff.

Lloyd George is reported to have said:

Legacy

Memorial On 2 May 2006, a trilingual memorial plaque (English/Welsh/Ukrainian) was unveiled in Jones's memory in the Old College at Aberystwyth University. His niece Margaret Siriol Colley was present along with the Ukrainian Ambassador to the UK, Ihor Kharchenko, who described Jones as an "unsung hero of Ukraine". The idea for a plaque and funding were provided by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, working in conjunction with the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain. Dr Lubomyr Luciuk, UCCLA's director of research, spoke at the unveiling ceremony.

In November 2008, Jones and fellow journalist Malcolm Muggeridge were posthumously awarded the Ukrainian Order of Merit at a ceremony in Westminster Central Hall, by Dr Kharchenko, on behalf of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko for their exceptional service to the country and its people.

Another plaque honouring Jones was unveiled at the Merthyr Dyfan Cemetery Chapel in Barry, Wales, on 30 October 2022, with the support of the Temerty Foundation, the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium, and the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation. Another plaque honoring him was placed in the National Library of Ukraine, in Kyiv, on 4 October 2023.

Diaries In November 2009, Jones's diaries recording the Great Soviet Famine of 1932–33 went on display for the first time in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The Living premiered 21 November 2008 at the Kyiv Cinema House. It was screened in February 2009 at the European Film Market, in spring 2009 at the Ukrainian Film Festival in Cologne, and in November 2009 at the Second Annual Cambridge Festival of Ukrainian Film. It received the 2009 Special Jury Prize Silver Apricot in the International Documentary Competition at the Sixth Golden Apricot International Film Festival in July 2009 and the 2009 Grand Prize of Geneva in September 2009.

In 2012, the documentary film Hitler, Stalin, and Mr Jones, directed by George Carey, was broadcast on the BBC series Storyville. It has subsequently been screened in select cinemas.

The 2019 feature film Mr Jones, starring James Norton and directed by Agnieszka Holland, focuses on Jones' investigation and reporting of the famine in Soviet Ukraine. The film has been heavily criticised by his surviving family due to several events that were included in the movie that Jones himself had never witnessed or written about and for its erasure of the pan-Soviet nature of his famine testimony . In January 2019, it was selected to compete for the Golden Bear at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival. The film won Grand Prix Golden Lions at the 44th Gdynia Film Festival in September 2019.

Commemoration The cities of Dnipro, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kremenchuk have Gareth Jones Street. There is Gareth Jones Lane in the cities of Dnipro and Kropyvnytskyi.