“There is no bread. (There is no bread.) We are dying.” “Eat. Eat. Eat.” These were the most common words British journalist Gareth Jones heard from the mouths of countless starving Ukrainian peasants in the spring of 1933. Look, at least we can still eat fodder for the cattle. Go further south. They have nothing there. The houses are empty because people have died.”
Young Jones described the situation in Ukraine at a press conference in Berlin after returning from a few days of hiking in the Ukrainian countryside. He wanted to see for himself the existence and extent of the famine that was said to be raging in the Soviet Union’s second largest republic.
He managed to arrive in Ukraine under the guise of a friendly diplomatic visit, and was one of the few who shocked the suspicious Soviet authorities. The fact that the fertile Ukraine was suffering from the worst famine of all times was carefully hidden from the world by Moscow, which effectively refuted it with lies and propaganda until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union, a master of distorting the truth, was particularly intransigent in the case of the great Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933. The real reason for this is sinister. The famine that diluted the Ukrainian population at that time was artificial, created by the regime. It was not a natural famine, a regular companion of mankind since time immemorial, as a result of weather conditions, bad harvests or mistaken economic policies. It was the ‘Holodomor’, or famine murder, a political tool of Stalin. How else could it be that, right in the middle of the breadbasket of Europe, as we have always called Ukraine, which for centuries has fed this very same Europe, suddenly there was not even a handful of wheat left?
The Ukrainians were deliberately starved out, and after the opening of many Soviet archives, irrefutable evidence continues to pile up. The Communist Party’s mistaken decisions on rapid industrialisation and forced collectivisation in the name of progress have, of course, contributed to the collapse of agricultural efficiency, but this was true for the whole of the Soviet Union.
But in a recalcitrant Ukraine, where there was a strong national consciousness, where Moscow never succeeded in completely suppressing the aspirations for independence, and where since the end of the First World War there had been resistance to centralised Bolshevik rule, Stalin used one of the cruellest weapons of mass murder.
In order to completely subjugate and eradicate the nation, he and his followers deliberately starved it. When the first predictions of the coming famine reached him, he rejoiced in “his victory over the conspirators”. He worsened the famine with ever harsher measures, seized the last of Ukraine’s grain supplies, closed the borders and introduced internal passports.
The only way for people to escape such suffering was to die. Swollen with hunger, with aged faces, cracked, purulent and transparent skin through which the slow beating of the heart could be seen, thin necks that could barely support the head, and above all, completely emptied of their minds by the horrific deaths of their loved ones, they said in their conversations with Jones: ‘We look forward to death’. In two years, one in eight Ukrainians died of hunger alone, some four million people in all. The life expectancy of a boy born in 1933 was five years, of a girl eight.
When even Ukrainian party leaders began to ask Stalin for help, he branded them traitors to the revolution and saboteurs. So the famine was joined by the purges – intellectuals, culturists, priests and wealthy peasants were being killed and deported to the gulag already in the late 1920s – and then the Ukrainian Bolsheviks joined in.
The world public turned a blind eye to a double tragedy. While the famine in Ukraine (which also hit Kuban, Kazakhstan and the North Caucasus) was no secret, few were prepared to question its real causes. Most foreign diplomats and journalists stationed in the Soviet Union consciously chose to believe Stalin’s propaganda for their own or their countries’ interests. Those who were willing to speak out, and Gareth Jones has pride of place among them, were vilified, accused of exaggeration, and their shocking testimonies were publicly questioned by celebrities and politicians. They have long been relegated to the margins of history.
The world has completely abandoned Ukraine to Stalin’s clutches. But since 1991, when it finally achieved independence, the memory of the Holodomor has been publicly revived, both on Ukrainian soil and around the world, as an inseparable part of Ukraine’s national consciousness. At the same time, it continues to mark the strained neighbourly relations with Russia.
The dream of an independent Ukraine
Ukraine’s geographical location has always shaped its history. The colours of the Ukrainian flag, blue for the clear sky and yellow for the endless wheat fields, best express its natural features. The ancient Greeks wrote of the fertile black soil, which allows them to sow and reap twice a year and feed millions of people with rich crops. This is what made it particularly attractive to its neighbours and, since it has no distinct natural boundaries, its territory was easy prey.
Although Ukraine was largely a colony, often divided between different countries and empires, and its borders changed frequently, Ukrainians developed a strong national identity with Slavic roots. Ukrainian was already established as a language in the Middle Ages and is related to both Russian and Polish.
The Russians have always had the biggest problems with recognising Ukrainians as a separate nation. They looked down on them and called them little brothers, and their land was considered a Russian province, southern Russia or even little Russia. This label is still often heard today.
When both the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed at the end of the First World War, and Ukraine was split between them, it finally had the chance to come into its own in a period when many new states were emerging from the remnants of old empires. The Ukrainian national movement for independence had already emerged in the 19th century. In the last period of the multi-ethnic Habsburg monarchy, Ukrainians in Galicia had much more autonomy than those within the Russian Empire. But the dream of both Austro-Hungarians and Russian Ukrainians was the unification of the nation in a single, independent state.
Then a whole host of conflicting territorial aspirations came to the fore. First, the Western Ukrainian Republic was created in the west, uniting Ukrainians from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire – Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia. But Galicia was also claimed by the Poles, and the Polish-Ukrainian War was fought, with the Poles winning. In 1919, Western Ukraine thus went to Poland, Bukovina to Romania and Transcarpathia to Czechoslovakia.
In the East, the situation was even more complicated. After the February Revolution of 1917 and the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty, the climate on Russian soil was favourable to democratic forces. New governments were formed in both Petrograd and Kiev, and the provisional Petrograd government recognised the Kiev government as the regional government of Ukraine. The Ukrainian National Movement set up a parliament or Central Rada, with representatives of peasants, workers, soldiers and culturalists.
The most progressive of them advocated far-reaching political and economic reforms, reforms of agriculture and the education system, and above all full autonomy from Russia. The common people supported them, but most of all they wanted an end to the war, which was still wreaking death among Ukrainian soldiers in the Russian army on the eastern front.
But the new Russian authorities under Alexander Kerensky made a fatal mistake. By launching a new invasion instead of listening to the people and advocating an end to the war with Germany, it opened the door wide to the Bolsheviks. They seized power in Russia with the October Revolution of 1917, and a dark period in Russian and, at the same time, Ukrainian history began.
The Bolsheviks subdue Ukraine
Between 1918 and 1921, a bloody civil war raged in Russia, showing the true face of the Bolsheviks. They used a steely hand and repressive methods to carry out violence, successfully subduing all their opponents. First they dealt with the opposition within their own Communist Party, and then they dealt with the White Army, made up of representatives of the fallen regime, monarchists, aristocrats and the imperial army, who also had the support of the Western powers because of the growing fear of the spread of the Communist revolution across Europe. Ukraine was caught up in the maelstrom of this war, and power changed hands on its territory like clockwork – in Kiev, power changed hands no less than twelve times in 1919.
Ukrainians were indeed in favour of changing the system, but they were against Bolshevism, centralisation of power and party repression, as many of the Ukrainian elites were liberals and social-democrats. They wanted their own country. So in January 1918, the Ukrainian Rada declared independence and the Ukrainian People’s Republic was born, a free and sovereign state on paper. Its priority objectives were protection from the Bolsheviks and the signing of an armistice with the Central Powers.
It is a little-known fact that the Ukrainians signed a separate armistice with the Central Powers in February 1918, less than a month before the Russians. Like the much better-known armistice with Russia, it was named after Brest-Litovsk and recognised the sovereignty of the recently established Ukrainian republic by the Central Powers. In exchange for access to Ukrainian wheat reserves, which the Germans and Austrians could use to feed their hungry soldiers, the Ukrainians were given military protection against the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks were forced to recognise Ukraine’s independence, at least temporarily, if they too wanted to sign a similar armistice with Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire.
But the new socialist Ukrainian government failed to establish an effective state apparatus and institutions, and the transition from a romantic rebel government to a functioning one did not succeed. The Germans easily ousted it and installed a right-wing puppet regime of the conservative authoritarian General Pavlo Skoropadsky. Nevertheless, his regime, with a firm hand, managed during this otherwise chaotic period to establish Ukraine’s first banks and a functioning financial system, local government services, an academy of science, a national library, archives and two universities. Thus the long-cherished dream of the Ukrainian intelligentsia was fulfilled.
With the end of the war and the defeat of the Central Powers, Skoropadsky fell and the Revolutionary Committee, or Direktoria, with Symon Petliura took over the government in Ukraine. But this mix of political movements was too divided among themselves and failed to establish the rule of law. There were also severe peasant revolts and for a while even the anarchist movement was very popular.
Then, until 1920, Ukrainians still resisted the invasion of the Bolsheviks, who, as Lenin admitted, needed Ukrainian grain and coal to make the socialist revolution a success. They were then tactically more lenient towards their “little” brothers, allowing them more cultural and national freedom, and even distributing long-promised land to the peasants. The tactic was successful, the Bolsheviks established control over virtually the entire Ukrainian territory of the former Russia, and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was born.
Soon the pretense was over and the closure of theatres and cultural institutions began, schooling and newspapers in Ukrainian were banned, and the most ominous prediction of the coming decade was the confiscation of grain. To stay in power, the Bolsheviks had to feed the hungry and rebellious Russian workers.
The first collective farms were also set up on a voluntary basis, but few Ukrainians decided to join them at that time. The last attempt to regain sovereignty came in the spring of 1920, when the Ukrainian national movement, led by Petliura and in alliance with the Poles, took over Kiev, but was finally expelled by the Red Army in June. Even before then, the Soviets had moved the capital of Ukraine from the progressive Kiev to the more easterly Kharkov, closer to the Russian border.
So ends a period that began with such high hopes for Ukraine. Instead of their own country, the western Ukrainians found themselves in Poland and, since 1922, the thirty million eastern Ukrainians found themselves in the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, the second largest in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). One of the main reasons for the failure was the immaturity of the Ukrainian national movement in establishing statehood. Yet, both the Ukrainian national identity and the desire for an independent state remained alive. And this is what proved fatal for the nation when, after Lenin’s death, the paranoid, insensitive Stalin took over the reins in Moscow.
From pragmatism to dogmatism
But before the tragedy that traumatised Ukraine for all time, a decade of difficult trials lay ahead. First, there was the severe famine of 1921-1922, which affected mainly the Volga region and southern Ukraine.
The result of a mixture of causes – severe drought, economic backwardness, dysfunctional rail transport and, above all, confiscation of grain – it differed from the famine of 1932-1933 in at least two key ways. Namely, the Russians did not hide it, and above all they did not deliberately cause it. It is true that the Bolsheviks confiscated the peasants’ grain and therefore had no reserves with which to sow a new harvest, but they quickly appealed for international help and took emergency measures against the famine.
By the summer of 1922, the Americans alone were feeding eleven million Russians a day, and aid in the form of food and medicine was also coming from international humanitarian organisations and other countries. Nevertheless, around two million Russians and at least half a million Ukrainians died then.
To better cope with the effects of the famine and economic crisis that followed the civil war, and to win the peasantry to their side, the Bolsheviks, on Lenin’s initiative, carried out a dramatic ideological reversal. This was to be only temporary, until the country was sufficiently on its feet to proceed with a “pure-blooded” socialist revolution.
The New Economic Policy, or NEP, pragmatically introduced a form of state capitalism and allowed some elements of market policy to be introduced into the economy. But Lenin also turned his attention to the Ukrainian national question and initiated a real “Ukrainisation”. Thus, within a few years, the number of books in Ukrainian doubled, and the number of schools where it was taught increased from fifty percent to almost ninety.
Lenin died in 1924. He was succeeded by the most ruthless of the contenders, Georgian Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. Stalin felt a special contempt and dislike for the Ukrainians, whom he did not regard as a nation. Painfully suspicious, he strengthened the Ukrainian secret police, convinced of the existence of anti-Soviet conspiracies and well-organised underground independence movements.
He was obsessed with the modernisation of the Soviet economy and the rapid rise of industrial production, because he also wanted to match the economic success of the other superpowers. Rapid development was to be made possible by even more rapid industrialisation, but only millions of workers could carry it out. And all those working hands and hungry mouths could only be fed by efficient agriculture under the regime’s tact.
As the NEP was not particularly successful, it was replaced by a planned economy in the form of utopian five-year plans to increase industrial production by 20% a year. The ideas of collectivising agriculture from the post-revolutionary era also returned.
The main purpose of collectivisation was to set up cooperative farms or kolkhozes and state farms or sovkhozes. Kolkhozes were formed by the merger of small private farms into cooperatives and were, at least on paper, jointly owned by those farmers whose farms were merged, but under the control of the state apparatus. Sovkhozes, on the other hand, were much larger farms wholly owned by the state, created either from undivided land or from large estates dating back to the days of imperial Russia. They were mostly rural people with no land of their own.
This transformation of traditional peasant society was to proletarianise the peasants so that they would begin to behave and think like the proletariat and thus contribute to the ultimate success of the revolution. But in reality it was much more like modern serfdom.
The looming catastrophe
For collectivisation to succeed, farmers had to be expropriated first. The independent peasant class was in any case to be an obstacle to the emergence of a communist society, of which the workers were the foundation. Especially in Ukraine, where eighty percent of the population was peasant, the loss of land was difficult for the peasants, who were not used to communal farming as in Russia, and who had only recently gained a modicum of autonomy.
Ukraine was the perfect solution to Stalin’s plans. With twenty percent of the population of the Soviet Union, it was the second most densely populated republic, and above all, it was fertile. Stalin’s equation went something like this – seizing Ukrainian grain would feed hungry workers, while its export would bring the Soviet Union enough money to buy machinery for rapid industrialisation.
Cereals were Stalin’s gold. Moreover, Stalin never forgot the Ukrainian insubordination of the post-World War I era, and the time had come for harsh punishment of disobedient “anti-Soviet conspirators”. For him, all Ukrainians were counter-revolutionaries, and he once even ‘exposed’ a conspiracy of vets.
Initially, collectivisation was voluntary, but because it was not happening fast enough, Moscow began sending thousands of party activists to Ukraine at the end of 1929 to carry it out by force. The Ukrainian leadership promised to collectivise the whole country within a year, and by the spring of 1930 more than seventy percent of the productive land had been annexed to collective farms. These, of course, had to meet the high quotas of grain and other agricultural produce confiscated by the state.
The Ukrainians bravely resisted, trying to keep their small plots of land, and instead of leaving their livestock to the collective farms, they slaughtered them and destroyed their tools. “We don’t want leaders who rob farmers!” “Down with the communists who are leading the country into disaster!” In addition, the communists have also launched an attack on the church, expelling priests, banning all rituals and traditional festivals, thus encroaching on the values and social fabric of the Ukrainian countryside.
Traditionally very religious, peasants saw collectivisation in apocalyptic terms. For many, going to a collective farm meant “selling their soul to the devil”. Thousands of people attacked activists and there were even murders of Soviet administrators. Nearly two thousand peasant revolts were recorded, and the army and police were sent in to deal with the rebels.
All those who resisted collectivisation were soon branded as kulaks. In the revolutionary Soviet Union, kulak was first a label for wealthier peasants, those who owned a lot of land, hired workers, had their own workshops and agricultural machinery, perhaps a mill. But kulak soon became a very loose and vague concept, meaning anyone who resisted collectivisation in any way.
So-called Troikas – a member of the police, a local party leader and a government commissioner – worked in each municipality to decide who was a kulak and what fate he would suffer (death or expulsion). “We decide who is a kulak as we see fit,” said one Troika representative. It used to be enough for someone to have two more cows than his neighbour.
Stalin announced the complete liquidation of the kulaks as a class. In 1930, 75,000 families were deported to labour camps, the infamous gulags in the Urals, Siberia and Kazakhstan, and at least 30,000 people lost their lives. The deported kulaks also benefited from the goals of rapid development as free labour. They built canals, mines, factories, railways, roads.
Some peasants managed to escape, especially to Poland, where many Ukrainians lived. This was a real international embarrassment for Stalin, and he began to blame the Ukrainian party leadership for the betrayal, saying that it had been too lenient with the people. This was to lead to revolts, to defections and, above all, to the failure to meet quotas, even though everyone, with Stalin at the head, knew that they were completely unrealistic.
Stalin, of course, could not admit the mistakes of collectivisation, because all his decisions were impeccable, and the Ukrainian Bolsheviks were a convenient sacrificial lamb. Because they “deliberately” failed to meet quotas and even allegedly stole and hid grain themselves, they were against the revolution. The first staged trials and purges began, culminating in 1936 and 1937.
The collectivisation of Ukraine is a failure
In 1930 and 1931, the kolkhozes were in complete disarray, nobody knew exactly what to do, there was a shortage of horses, tractors and farm machinery, the most able farmers were deported to the gulags, and the rest lost the will to work when all their possessions were confiscated. As a result, sowing was delayed and the weather was not good. Crime spread and, because of the shortage, farmers really started to hide and even steal food.
Ukrainian party leaders started sending requests for aid to Moscow early on, but instead received only messages that they had to continue to meet their quotas of confiscated grain. So they also had to send seed that would otherwise have been used for new sowing. Then the worst could still have been averted. They could have restricted exports and asked for international help.
Instead, Stalin blamed the situation on Ukrainian peasants – “thieves, saboteurs” – and punished them even further. He even claimed that the famine in Ukraine was a fabrication and that people were starving deliberately. He sent agitator brigades to Ukraine, made up of budding communist youth, to confiscate the grain and produce that the peasants were trying to keep for their own needs.
The brigades took up this task with great enthusiasm, having been successfully brainwashed beforehand. “We were performing a historic duty. This was our revolutionary task. We were collecting grain for the socialist fatherland. For the five-year-olds.”
According to them, the starving kulaks refused to adapt to the regime and there was no room for them in the brave new world. The activists took everything from the people, food from their pots and ovens, fruit from their trees, vegetables from their gardens, even their clothes and, of course, their livestock.
“During the investigations, activists asked us where our gold was and where our wheat was. My mother replied that we had nothing. They tortured her. They stuck her fingers between the doors, closed them and broke all her bones. Blood flowed, she fell unconscious. Then they poured water on her head and tortured her again. They beat her, stuck a needle under her fingernails /…/.”
They humiliated the frightened peasants, raped their girls and wives, beat them, tortured them, urinated on their crops and shouted, “Peasant, where is your grain? Confess!” “Even if you were only alive, it was suspicious and they asked ‘How is it possible that no one in your family has ever died?’ Why haven’t you disappeared yet? Why haven’t you collapsed dead on the floor? Why are you even alive?'”
It got worse when the draconian ‘Class Law’ was passed in August 1932. Anyone who tried to steal anything became an enemy of the state and faced a minimum sentence of ten years in a labour camp or death. People were also killed for an ear of wheat, a rotten potato peel or a single carrot. By the end of the year, around five thousand people had been executed and one hundred thousand sent to the gulags, where they were in desperate need of labour.
In October, Stalin reduced the quotas only slightly, but as they reached only a third again in November, the rest of the Ukrainian party officials were sent to the Gulag. The suicide of Stalin’s wife the day after the 15th anniversary of the October Revolution further threw the dictator off track. Although Nadezhda had long been depressed and increasingly disillusioned with her husband’s policies, the ultimate reason for her suicide was precisely her disapproval of the failure of collectivisation and the brutal treatment of the peasants.
Gareth Jones
Since the revolution, events in the Soviet Union have been watched closely in the West, some with enthusiasm, others with horror, others with interest. Among the latter was Gareth Jones, a budding young journalist who had been interested in Russia from a young age and had learned Russian fluently.
As a boy, he enjoyed his mother’s youthful stories, as for several years she was a private tutor to the grandchildren of industrial magnate John Hughes, founder of the town of Hughesovka (or Yuzevka, now Donetsk). Gareth also had a flair for travel and travelled extensively across Europe while studying languages at Cambridge. He was an excellent student, but after a short academic career he lost interest in it. He wanted to go out into the world and was particularly interested in foreign policy.
While flirting with journalism, he was lucky to meet the influential former Liberal British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He was looking for a foreign affairs adviser at the time and immediately offered the not-yet-25-year-old Jones a job. It was 1930.
One of the first tasks he carried out for Lloyd George was to describe Soviet economic policy and Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. He was already well acquainted with the Russian situation and in his analysis warned of the possibility of peasant revolts due to collectivisation and food shortages, falling living standards and the repression of the Communist Party.
Then Britain and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations and the possibility of travelling on Russian soil was reopened for the British. Gareth immediately jumped at the chance and, on his first trip to the Soviet Union, first visited the town where his mother lived. Working for Lloyd George opened many doors for him and he was able, among other things, to meet Party leaders and see the collective farms up close.
But his favourite thing was talking to people. This was one of his special qualities – even during his later visits, he would spend hours talking to ordinary people, carefully writing everything down in his notebook. All these notes and diaries were preserved by his sister after Gareth’s death. They are full of human stories, anecdotes and even jokes. Once he was talking to an elderly Georgian man who told him a joke about a drowning man. “The pilot saw the poor man from the plane, came down and rescued him. It turned out that the drowning man was Stalin, and he promised the rescuer anything he wished for.
Gareth correctly grasped the pulse of a peasant society that had no sympathy for Stalin and his regime. He wrote to his family: “Russia is in a very bad state; it is rotting, there is no food, only bread; oppression, injustice, misery among the workers, ninety per cent are discontented /…/ The government is the most brutal in the world. The peasants hate the communists.”
In the autumn of 1930, he began to publish his first articles on the Soviet Union as a freelance journalist, demonstrating what an astute and insightful observer he was. In addition to the Petlekas, collectivisation, industrialisation, “de-Kulakization” and the expulsion of intellectuals, he also focused on the increasingly aggressive and misleading propaganda that equated the kulaks with capitalist evil and promoted class hatred.
Propaganda proved to be the most effective Soviet political tool. Vasily Grossman, one of the most influential Russian writers of the 20th century, wrote in 1961: “I am no longer under a spell, I see now that the kulaks were human beings too. But why was my heart so numb? When such terrible things were happening, when such suffering was all around me? And the truth is that I really didn’t see them as human beings.”
Will there be soup?
The following year, Jones returned to the Soviet Union accompanied by the heir to the US food “ketchup” empire, Jack Heinz II, who was seeking investment opportunities there on behalf of the family business. The two young men combed the country through and through, and Jones described their adventures in detail. Thanks to Heinz’s connections, they had access to virtually all the people and the Soviet backstage. Among other things, Jones met Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and as one of the few Communists, she charmed him with her modesty and intelligence.
Later, Heinz wrote a book using Jones’ notes, but it was not particularly well received. But in it, they had already described in detail the onset and causes of the famine. Jones also published anonymously a series of articles entitled “The Real Russia”, and lectured widely. He described labour inefficiencies, poor planning and quality control, poor transport infrastructure, lack of initiative and innovation. He also wrote about the hopes of young people, the fight against illiteracy, new polytechnic schools and full employment. And about people who really believed in the system and its promises.
Soon, alarming rumours began to spread in the West about a growing famine in parts of the Soviet Union. Jones, who had known for some time that famine was inevitable, wrote another article entitled “Will there be soup?”, prepared his suitcase and returned to Moscow. He got his visa as a sign of official Soviet favour on account of his acquaintance with Lloyd George, and the Russian ambassador in London told Moscow to do him a special favour. They did not know that Jones had made the journey on his own.
Let us rejoice in death!
The first mass deaths began to be reported from Ukraine in late 1932. The countryside was completely plundered and devastated, and the only way people could find a scrap of food was in the cities. There, workers and officials ate on vouchers in government canteens. Tens of thousands of starving people flocked to the cities every day in the hope of food. They were mainly children, orphans, “living skeletons”, and the police had the special task of hunting them down and imprisoning them in orphanages, where they were waiting to die, up to twenty thousand at a time. The children preferred to die in the air, begging the police: “Let me die in peace, I don’t want to die in the shacks of death.”
People hung themselves from trees in despair, threw themselves under trains, fell unconscious and died on the way to the city, and horrified witnesses reported babies on the chests of dead mothers trying to get every last drop of milk.
The towns could no longer cope with the pressure, so they banned the sale of rail tickets to villagers. They also introduced internal passports and closed Ukraine’s borders to prevent rumours of the horrors from spreading too widely and to prevent an exodus. It was the ultimate death sentence for millions. At the same time, lectures on Ukrainian history and language were abolished in the universities.
In the spring of 1933, ten thousand people a day died in Ukraine. Unimaginably tragic life stories were written – how parents protected their children from cannibals who roamed the villages at night looking for victims, sending them to relatives, leaving them in orphanages or railway stations, sometimes murdering them out of desperation, sometimes even eating them or perhaps feeding them to other family members.
A six-year-old girl, who was rescued by relatives, was about to be slaughtered by her father, and she remembered him standing over her with a knife. In an orphanage, the children began to eat the youngest of them, and he himself ate his own flesh, while others drank the blood from his wounds. “We took the child away from our hungry mouths and wept,” wrote the women who ran the orphanage. Yet society still strongly condemned and punished cannibalism, and many police records survive. Cannibalism remains a social taboo and Ukrainians rarely talk about it.
The different states of hunger cause mental suffering as well as physical, and many people end up going mad and are no longer aware of their actions. It is madness that has often led to cannibalism. Before death, when people become indifferent and listless, they are prepared to do anything to survive, and most of the time this has meant eating the most bizarre organic things. They cooked and roasted dogs, cats, frogs, toads, horses, ants, hedgehogs, squirrels, bird eggs, leather, and ate bark, moss, acorns, corn cobs and stalks, straw, bran, weeds, leaves, woodchips, sawdust, potato peelings, millet pods, grass, roots, unripe vegetables.
Many died because their stomachs were not used to it, and dysentery and typhoid fever spread. In the struggle for survival, human trust also disappeared and the desire for food often took precedence over family ties and parental love. Crime was rampant and neighbourhood murders for stolen rotten roots were common.
It was in this situation that Gareth Jones arrived in Moscow on 4 March 1933. He immediately began to take stock of his impressions of the situation in the Soviet Union, meeting foreign diplomats and journalists, reading newspapers, collecting eyewitness accounts. He reported that the famous Torgsin shops, where one could buy only with foreign currency, were “full of everything”.
Then he decided to see for himself what was happening in Ukraine. At that time, Western journalists were already banned from travelling freely in the country, but Jones outwitted the authorities, obtained the necessary credentials and set off with an invitation from the German consul in Kharkiv. He bought a train ticket, but had no intention of going there immediately. He slipped off the train some seventy kilometres from Kharkov and set off on foot through Ukrainian villages.
Wherever he went, a hunger of colossal proportions greeted him. All he heard was, “They are all bloated with hunger.” “We are waiting to die.” “We are looking forward to death.” Once, when he shared his food with a little girl, she said, “Now that I have eaten these wonderful things, I can die happy.” He later wrote about all these experiences in twenty-one articles.
During his march, however, he became suspicious and was eventually “returned” by the army to Kharkov, where he continued to take stock of the misery. He was particularly appalled by the bread lines. Forty thousand people also queued up in the afternoon, perhaps to get a crumb a day or two later.
Jones then quietly left the Soviet Union, immediately held a press conference in Berlin and told the world his shocking story.
Shameful denial of the Ukrainian famine
But the response from the world public and politicians has been lukewarm. Worse, the response of journalists and correspondents in Moscow, who were intimately familiar with the reality, was abjectly dishonourable and today constitutes one of the most shameful episodes in the history of journalism.
The Russian authorities were furious, which was understandable. Jones had betrayed their trust, and Russian Foreign Minister Litvinov complained directly to Lloyd George, who was also not impressed by Jones’ adventure. He reportedly never spoke to him again.
Litvinov was furious in Moscow: “I even met him myself, and now he turns out to be an impostor.” In the official Soviet world, famine did not exist, neither in the newspapers nor in public speeches, and the Soviets categorically refused to help the Ukrainian diaspora, otherwise they would have admitted the failure of Stalin’s policy.
But it was not only Moscow that was outraged, as many Western intellectuals supported the regime. For example, on 2 March of that year, George Bernard Shaw, the Irish Nobel Prize-winning playwright and political activist, published a letter in the English media with twenty of his followers, in support of the Soviet Union. They described their recent travels in this ‘civilised country’, where they saw no evidence of the economic slavery and poor conditions of which some had spoken, and argued for closer relations between Britain and the Soviet Union. And that was the essence of the situation. Interestingly, Bernard Shaw celebrated his 75th birthday in 1931 at a luxury banquet in Moscow.
With the dangerous rise of Hitler, who had just taken full power in Germany, the West, fearful of Nazism, sought an alliance with the Soviets, and was willing to overlook the crimes against its own population. Thus, in 1933, the Americans also established full diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, hoping for a profitable economic relationship in the difficult period following the Great Depression.
Jones stuck to his story no matter what. Naively, he counted on the support of his journalistic colleagues, but he was wrong. Immediately after the press conference and the first article in the London Evening Standard, entitled “Hunger rules Russia”, one of the most famous and respected journalists in the world at the time, the Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, Walter Duranty, published an article entitled “Russians hungry but not starving”. In it, he denied Jones’s “big scary story” and denounced him as a young upstart without the necessary journalistic experience and understanding of the circumstances. He even won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a series of articles on the successes of collectivisation.
Duranty had been a journalist in Moscow since 1922 and had made a luxurious life for himself there, thanks to the ruling regime. He had a large apartment, a car, a mistress, access to all the party leaders, even Stalin. He was not prepared to trade his status for the truth. He did not try to sugarcoat everything, but he argued that the regime sometimes had to make sacrifices in order to achieve its goals. His phrase: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” later became infamous.
There were other journalists on Duranty’s side who preferred to remain silent rather than be expelled. Some of them were the real brass knuckles of the regime, for every article sent by telegraph from the Soviet Union had first to be officially stamped by the authorities. Only the well-known British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge managed to smuggle in a few articles by diplomatic pouch that corroborated Jones’s story. In Moscow, after the Jones fiasco, controls on journalists were tightened even further and they were no longer allowed to use the terms hunger and starvation, but only food shortages or food austerity.
Media coverage of the Ukrainian famine slowly faded, and after the summer of 1933, no more articles appeared in English newspapers. Adolf Hitler dominated the headlines. But the Ukrainian diaspora remained vocal and public protests were organised in Canada, Brussels, Prague, Geneva, London. Alexander Wienerberger, an Austrian engineer working in Kharkiv, smuggled some two dozen photographs across the border to immortalise the tragedy. These are in fact the only surviving pictorial evidence.
Jones knew he would never be able to return to the Soviet Union. So he titled his last article “Goodbye, Russia.” He continued to lecture, to educate himself and even drafted a book, “Bread Rules Russia.” New challenges awaited him in the Far East, where he went in 1935 to write about the increasingly tense relations in the region. In August, he was kidnapped and killed on the day before his thirtieth birthday. The car in which he was abducted belonged to the Soviet secret police. To this day, however, the Kremlin archives on Gareth Jones are not public.
The legacy of the Holodomor
All journalists, including Duranty, later admitted their mistakes. Not only that, they even admitted that they had deliberately denied or belittled Jones’ claims. But by then the brave journalist was dead and slowly fading into obscurity, until his memory was revived by his niece and great-nephew, and above all until Ukraine became an independent country.
Every year since then, it has commemorated the Holodomor as Stalin’s attempt to destroy the Ukrainian nation and identity. In 2006, the Ukrainian Parliament declared the deliberately created famine a genocide, and it is a widely recognised international fact that it was one of the worst crimes against humanity in the 20th century. Today, Gareth Jones is a Ukrainian national hero, while efforts are still under way to posthumously deprive Walter Duranty of the Pulitzer Prize.
Moscow succeeded in temporarily taming Ukraine almost 90 years ago by artificially starving, deporting and murdering intellectuals. With lies and propaganda, it has “shielded” the world from the truth. The Ukrainians, however, have managed to preserve themselves as a nation and have finally lived to see their own state. But is history not repeating itself today?
