Gareth Jones (journalist)

Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones
Born(1905-08-13)13 August 1905
Barry, Glamorgan, Wales, United Kingdom
Died12 August 1935(1935-08-12) (aged 29)
Inner Mongolia,[1] China
OccupationJournalist

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.[a]

Jones had reported anonymously in The Times in 1931 on starvation in Soviet Ukraine and Southern Russia,[3] 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.[4] Reports by Malcolm Muggeridge, writing in 1933 as an anonymous correspondent, appeared contemporaneously in the Manchester Guardian;[5] his first anonymous article specifying famine in the Soviet Union was published on 25 March 1933.[6]

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.[7] 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."[8]

  1. ^ "Gareth Jones' Relative: Russia Repeating Repressive 1930s Famine Methods".
  2. ^ Snyder, Timothy (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books. pp. 55–56. ISBN 978-0-465-00239-9.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Forgotten was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference SovietArticles was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ "The Price of Russia's 'Plan': Virtual Breakdown of Agriculture". From our Moscow Correspondent. The Manchester Guardian. 12 January 1933, pp. 9–10. The "Moscow correspondent" was Malcolm Muggeridge.
    "The Soviet and the Peasantry. An Observer's Notes. I: Famine in North Caucasus". The Manchester Guardian. 25 March 1933, pp. 13–14. (Again, the "Observer" was Muggeridge. This and the following two articles were smuggled out of Russia in a diplomatic bag.)
    "The Soviet and the Peasantry. An Observer's Notes. II: Hunger in the Ukraine". The Manchester Guardian. 27 March 1933, pp. 9–10.
    "The Soviet and the Peasantry. An Observer's Notes. III: Poor Harvest in Prospect". The Manchester Guardian. 28 March 1933, pp. 9–10.
    Carynnyk, Marco (November 1983). "The Famine the Times Couldn't Find". Commentary.

    Taylor, Sally J. (2003). "A Blanket of Silence: The Response of the Western Press Corps in Moscow to the Ukraine Famine of 1932–33". In Isajiw, Wsevolod W. (ed.). Famine-genocide in Ukraine, 1932–1933: Western Archives, Testimonies and New Research. Toronto: Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre. ISBN 978-0921537564. OCLC 495790721.

  6. ^ Taylor 2003.
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference BBC5July2012 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference knew too much was invoked but never defined (see the help page).


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