Gareth Jones: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

1905 - 1935

  This is the short story of Gareth Jones, a young Welshman who died on the eve of his thirtieth birthday ‘In Search of News’.  Gareth Jones was embarking on the profession of Journalism.  He was a man who endeavoured to tell the truth, and was concerned with the predicament of all nations of the world during the tumultuous period of the early thirties.  With absolute fearlessness he endeavoured to expose the plight of the Genocide-Famine in Soviet Russia and particularly in Ukraine despite adverse criticism from many sources.

  As a child in the early nineteen hundreds, Gareth Jones heard many tales from his mother, Mrs Annie Gwen Jones about her experiences in Ukraine.  She had been a tutor to the grandchildren of the Welshman, John Hughes who had been commanded by the Tzar Alexander II in 1868 to find iron ore and coal for the manufacture of steel and who then founded the town of Hughesovska (formerly Stalino), now the city of Donetz.  The stories of her youthful experiences instilled in Gareth Jones the desire to visit the country where his mother from 1889 had spent three happy years.  After gaining First Class Honours in French in 1926 from the University College of Wales, Aberyswyth, Gareth Jones attended Cambridge University and in 1929 graduated with First Class Honours in German, French and of course, Russian which he spoke fluently.  In 1930 the he became Foreign Affairs Adviser to the First War Prime Minister, David Lloyd George.

In the summer of 1930, Gareth Jones made his first visit to the Soviet Union.

On August 17^th 1930 the young man wrote a few carefully chosen words to his mother in Wales commencing his letter with “Hughesovka !!”

At last he had performed a pilgrimage to the steel town.  But the twenty-five year old did not stay long and left immediately for a small place in the Caucasian mountains, called Kislovodsk 

Before leaving the U.S.S.R. Gareth Jones was taken by car to see a State Farm, Gigant No.2.  The Communists had converted the desert steppes into a vast farm covering a hundred thousand acres which was run by the most modern agricultural machinery.  Everywhere there were new buildings and he noted that industrially Soviet Russia was proceeding at a rapid rate.  In the State farm he was given excellent meals in contrast to the starving peasants.

A week later on his arrival in Berlin, near the station for Saxony on August 26^th, the young man wrote a further letter to his parents:

Hurray!  It is wonderful to be in Germany again, absolutely wonderful.  Russia is in a very bad state; rotten, no food, only bread; oppression, injustice, misery among the workers and 90% discontented.  I saw some very bad things, which made me mad to think that people like Bernard Shaw go there and come

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