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Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones visits Ukraine on Three Occasions.

The town of Hughesovka is a legend now, but in 1889 when Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones’ mother, Annie Gwen Jones lived there, it was a bustling place of 50,000 persons. Today it is the vast city of Donetsk. She spent three very happy years as tutor to the grandchildren of the founder, a Welsh man, John Hughes.  It was the many stories of her experiences that instilled in Gareth a desire to visit the exciting country of which his mother was so fond.

Gareth based his bright academic career with a view to visiting Ukraine and the Soviet Union, Russia as it was so often called in the west, and so he learnt to speak Russian fluently, one of the five languages he spoke.  His first visit was in 1930 when he made what he called his pilgrimage to Hughesovka. He was 25 years old and had recently been appointed Foreign Affairs Adviser to the former Wartime Prime Minister David Lloyd George. His letter home from Berlin revealed already a desperate situation in Ukraine.

“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. … One reason why I left Hughesovka 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”

Gareth’s second visit to Ukraine was at the end of a six weeks tour of the Soviet Union with Jack Heinz and they stocked themselves up well with tins of baked beans for the visit. Gareth wrote a series of diaries and from these Jack published anonymously the book, Experiences in Russia – 1931: A Diary.  The pair visited the great new dam on the Dnieper river. While there he called at a German Commune. One peasant said to them: “They sent the Kulaks away from here and it was terrible.  We heard in a letter that ninety children died on the way - ninety children from this district.” … An old man with a cap on the back of his head came up and greeted them: “We are starving. Look what they give us - nothing! nothing!  How can we live with nothing in our dvor?  And we can’t say anything or they’ll send us away as they did the others.  All are weeping in the villages today, little brother.”[i]

In the autumn of 1932, after a year in New York, Gareth was again working for David Lloyd George and news was filtering in to the city of London of the famine.  On September 13, 1932 the young man wrote to his previous employer, Ivy Lee, a well-known entrepreneur, in New York: “The Soviet Government is facing the worst crisis since 1921.  The harvest is a failure, and there will be millions facing starvation this winter.  There is at the present moment a famine in the Ukraine XE "Ukraine" .  Collective farms have been a complete failure, and there is now a migration from the farms.” [ii]

In January 1933, having assisted Lloyd George in writing his War Memoirs, Gareth left for Europe before joining the Western Mail as a journalist. His first call was Germany where he was present on the day Adolph Hitler was made Chancellor and on February 22^nd, he flew with Hitler to a rally at Frankfurt.  By March 6, 1933, Gareth was in Moscow preparing for his visit to Ukraine. He packed his knapsack with food bought from the Torgsin store and travelled with the peasants, hard-class to Ukraine buying his ticket from a station outside of the capital.

Alighting from the train on the border of Ukraine Gareth walked along the railway track talking to the peasants whom he passed. He recorded all in his small diaries, still in our possession, and he noted what he saw in them.  The peasants had the same story. “There is no bread.  We haven’t had bread for over five months.  A lot are dying. The first village had no more potatoes left and the store of beetroot was running out.”  They all said: “The cattle is dying.  We used to feed the world and now we are hungry.  How can we sow when we have few horses left?  How will we be able to work when we are weak from want of food? In one village all bread had gone two months ago, and potatoes just run out and there was only … Beetroot.” One woman said, “We are looking forward to death.”[iii]

 “In the South 20% of the population have died of hunger,” said a young worker and in some parts 50%. They are murdering us.” There is seed in this village. Cattle decrease is disastrous.    There used to be 200 cattle.    Now 6 horses and cattle down by tremendous amount.” Another entry: “Queues of 7,000 stand.  They begin to queue at 3-4 o’clock in afternoon to get bread the next morning at seven.  It is freezing – many degrees of frost.” “There is no bread and there will be no bread today.” Shouts angry peasants also there. “ But citizens there is no bread” “How long here?” Gareth asked a man. “Two days.”  Leaving Karkiv it was the sight of the starving homeless boys which most affected Gareth some dying of typhus.[iv]

Of significance is a cryptic diary entry about Ukrainian Nationalism and in Welsh he wrote, “Dyn  mwyaf pwysig (very important man)”.

“Russification and Centralisation policy – new  edict in last month.    Skrypnik, the Commissar  for  Education has been removed (now in Gosplan) was for Ukrainian rights. He was accused over Ukrainisation.  He was removed at the beginning March.”  Shums’ki’s name was also mentioned. [v]

Needing to know more I found that following the October Revolution Ukrainian Nationalism was encouraged by Mykola Skrypnik who took over from Oleksander Shums’ki as Commissar for Education 1925 and Ukraine became an autonomous, though remained a Bolshevik country. However, in January 1933 “Stalin had sent his henchman, Pavel Postyshev to replace him, and he, Skrypnik was accused of Ukrainisation.

  During the first year of Postyshev’s presence in Ukraine, nearly 100,000 were purged from the CP(b)U.[vi] Skrypnik  committed “suicide” in the July 1933.”

Gareth left Moscow, and on March 26, 1933, he arrived at the home of his friend, Reinhardt Haferkorn in Danzig, relieved to be at last in civilization and immediately he wrote to his parents:

“The Russian situation is absolutely terrible, famine almost everywhere, and millions are dying of starvation.  I tramped for several days through villages in the [sic] Ukraine XE "Ukraine" , and there was no bread, many children had swollen stomachs, nearly all the horses and cows had died and the people themselves were dying.  The terror has increased tremendously and the G.P.U. has almost full control.  It was a disgrace to arrest the six engineers, two of whom I know.” [vii]

Reaching Berlin on March 29^th 1933 Gareth gave a press release which was published in the New York Evening Post and in British News papers including the Manchester Guardian: ‘Famine Gripping Russia, Millions Dying’.[viii] On March 31^st there followed the infamous rebuttal by Walter Duranty in the New York Times, ‘Russians Hungry but not Starving’[ix] to which Gareth replied in the New York Times on May 13^th. “Everywhere I went in the Russian villages I heard the cry, ‘There is no bread, we are dying,’ and that there was famine in the Soviet Union, menacing the lives of millions of people.”

In March six British engineers working for Metro-Vickers were accused of espionage and imprisoned in the Lubyankoa.  Not only was their trial, the Metrovik Affair used as a smoke screen to divert from the famine, but also the Moscow correspondents who wished to report on the trial were persuaded, to their shame, to accuse Gareth of being a liar.  “The throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes - but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation.… We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that damned Jones as a liar.”[x]  Further false incriminations followed when Maxim Litvinoff sent a telegram to the Soviet Ambassador, Maisky in London to pass a message to Lloyd George. It accused Gareth of espionage and he was placed on the black list of the Soviet Secret Police – a marked man.

On his return to Britain Gareth wrote at least 20 articles describing the famine in Ukraine and the Soviet Union. In the Daily Express[xi] there is a heart rendering description of what he had seen in Ukraine:

“In one of the peasant’s cottages in which I stayed we slept nine in the room. It was pitiful to see that two out of the three children had swollen stomachs. All there was to eat in the hut was a very dirty watery soup, with a slice or two of potato, which all the family and in the family, I included myself ate from a common bowl with wooden spoons.

“Fear of death loomed over the cottage, for they had not enough potatoes to last until the next crop. When I shared my white bread and butter and cheese one of the peasant women said, ‘Now I have eaten such wonderful things I can die happy.’ I set forth again further towards the south and heard the villagers say, "We are waiting for death."

“Many also said, "It is terrible here and many are dying, but further south it is much worse. Go down to the Poltava region and you will see hundreds of empty cottages. In a village of three hundred huts only about a hundred will have people living, in them, for the others will have died or have fled, but mainly died."

No further articles written by Gareth appeared in Britain after April 20.  One of his last articles was Goodbye Russia[xii].  He realised that he would never be able to return to the country about which he knew so much and for which his mother had had so much affection. I feel sure, but I cannot prove it that the British establishment silenced Gareth.  The rise of National Socialism and the newly appointed Chancellor of Germany, Adolph Hitler as well as the fear of Japan with its designs of incursion into China took precedence over the fate of the starving Ukrainians. The British Policy of Appeasement was paramount and the cowardice of weak governments apparent. David Lloyd George appeared to never contact Gareth again after the young man questioned his admiration for Stalin 

Later Gareth wrote a number of articles in the United States published and syndicated by the Randolph Hearst newspaper organisation. Much of what he said of course is a repetition of what he had already written.  In the Boston Sunday Advertiser in May 1933:[xiii]

“The famine is man-made. It is the result of the Soviet policy of abolishing the private farm and replacing it by large collective farms, where the land and cattle were owned in common.[1] …

“Perhaps the new agricultural policy of the Soviet Government will help. It is, first, to send many thousands of town workers, called the Political Department, into the villages. Their task will be to crush all opposition and organize work in the collective farms. They are ruthless men who may be relied upon to do their task with violence. While they may succeed in terrorizing the peasants, it is difficult to see how they can succeed in increasing the harvest.

“The second point of the governments new policy is the new agricultural tax, by which the collective farms will pay in tax so much gain (usually about 2 ½ centners) per hectare of the sowing area PLANNED, and be free to sell the rest in open.

I asked some peasants about that. One said:

"Yes, they said it would be alright last year to sell the surplus on the private market, yet they took everything away. We do not believe them any longer. They say they will only take 15 poods per hectare, but they will take everything.

“In most districts the yield will be so small that it may be less than the tax. The peasants have so lost faith in the government that the new policy will not encourage the peasants to work. The outlook for the harvest therefore, remains black in spite of the new policy.”

 And in the New York American in January 1935:[xiv]

“The Communists came and seized our land, they stole our cattle and they tried to make us work like serfs in a farm where nearly everything was owned in common" – the eyes of the group of Ukrainian farmers flashed with anger as they spoke to me – "and do you know what they did to those who resisted? They shot them ruthlessly."

“I was listening to another famine-stricken village further down the icy railroad track which I was tramping and the story I now heard was one of real warfare in the villages.

“The peasants told me how in each village the group of the hardest-working men – the kulaks they called them – had been captured and their land, livestock and houses confiscated, and they themselves herded into cattle trucks and sent for a thousand or two thousand miles or more with almost no food on a journey to the forests of the north where they were to cut timber as political prisoners.

“In one village which was inhabited by German colonists – and what a spotlessly clean and well-kept place it was! – they told me trainloads had left the district packed full of wailing farmers and their families.

“Torn [a]way from their homes prisoners of the heartless secret police and the hated land army, which exists to drive the peasants to work, these formerly well-to-do farmers had as their only crime the fact that they had worked all day and into the night, had had little more land and had accumulated one or two more cows than others.”

 Though many of those, who knew Gareth had decried his exposure of the famine, he felt vindicated following a visit to his friends, the Haferkorns, in Danzig.  There, he met a diplomat who privately corroborated Gareth’s Soviet observations and he informed his parents on Sunday May 28, 1933. [xv]

“… The German Consul in Kharkov and his wife thought that my Russian articles gave a wonderful picture, but that it was really much worse than I described it.  Since March it has got so much worse that it is horrible to be in Kharkoff.  So many die, ill and beggars.  They are dying off in the villages, he said, and the spring sowing campaign is catastrophic.  The peasants have been eating the seed.  To talk of a bumper crop, as Molotoff did, was a tragic farce, and he only said that to keep their spirits up, but nobody believed Molotoff.  Many villages are empty.  The fate of the German colonists is terrible, in some villages 25% have died off and there will be more dying off until August.  In August, he said there would be an epidemic of deaths because hungry peasants would suddenly eat so much as to kill themselves.”

The last British reference to Gareth’s famine exposure for almost sixty years appeared as a glimmer of exoneration, when on August 28, 1933, The Western Mail XE "Western Mail"  obtained an edited version of Dr. Schiller XE "Schiller:Otto" ’s articles’[xvi]

“Cardinal Innitzer Striking confirmation ‘of Mr. Gareth Jones’s revelations in the Western Mail & South Wales News of the famine conditions in Russia is provided by the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, who has issued the following appeal to the world:  "No attempts at denial can flow hide the fact that hundreds of thousands - yes, millions men and women have in the last few months perished of hunger in Soviet Russia. 

 "Hundreds of tragic letters from the famine areas of Soviet Union, especially from the Ukraine and North Caucasus, point to this, and eye-witnesses about whose authority there can be no doubt have depicted terrible details of the tragedy which is in progress in Russia.  …The Englishman, Gareth Jones also confirms this.”

I think of my grandmother and how shocked she would have been by the famine in Ukraine. I think of my uncle, Gareth and realise that both would have wished me to speak for them. Tragically two years later, on August 12, 1935 Gareth was captured by bandits on the eve of his thirtieth birthday in Inner Mongolia and held for ransom for £8,000.  He was investigating the intentions of the Japanese to invade China and possibly strike north against the Soviet Union into Siberia. Gareth’s death in mysterious circumstances was a tragedy, not only to his parents, but to his beloved country, Wales and the fact that such a brilliant future lay before him was cut short. Had lived he would have been able to tell the truth about Ukraine. His mother in her sorrow kept his papers with this in mind and so it behoves me to endeavour to speak for them.

Just as Gareth was airbrushed out of history by his contemporaries so did Stalin and his colleagues cunningly conceal the fact there was a great famine in Ukraine.

******

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