No one has yet told the true story of events currently terrifying the USSR.
A famine appears to be killing thousands of Ukrainian peasants.
It's not due to climatic conditions, because the Soviet government has
been blessed in the last few years.
Persistent rumours suggest that this famine is being caused
by the Bolsheviks.
But why would Stalin allow Soviet citizens to die, when he claims to
have brought happiness and prosperity to their lives?
This is the subject of my next article.
My name is Gareth Jones.
Until a few weeks ago, I was foreign affairs adviser to Lloyd George,
the former prime minister of Great Britain.
I'm now a journalist.
I write for the Western Mail and will be making this journey
on their behalf.
A journey of 6,000 miles lies before me across the Europe of 1933,
a continent torn apart by national passion, class hatred and the
recent world economic crisis.
My mission will take me across the North Sea in Germany,
before crossing the Soviet border
and making my way to Moscow, capital of the young USSR.
I know this country well.
It's my third journey to the Soviet Union.
I want to understand this famine.
To hear from real folk, the forgotten men,
talking to them in their own language, Russian.
Having worked for Lloyd George opens doors for me.
Just before leaving for Moscow, I get a real scoop.
I'm the first foreign journalist
to be allowed to fly in Adolf Hitler's private plane.
He's only been Reich chancellor for three weeks, and already he's causing
concern and attracting attention from around the world.
In the plane, Hitler is a few feet away.
Goebbels is just behind him.
If aeroplanes should crash, whole history of Europe would change.
How has this ordinary looking man managed to become deified
by 14 million people?
The sun glints on the engine to the left.
Hitler has fallen asleep.
I'm about to leave Germany, where a dictatorship has just begun,
for the land of dictatorship by the working class.
From the country of Fascism,
I'm now on my way to the home of Bolshevism to investigate
the famine in Ukraine.
I'll have to be careful in Russia
because I lied to the Soviet Embassy in order to get my visa.
I didn't tell them that I no longer work for Lloyd George.
I request that you take Gareth Jones into your care as soon as he arrives
in Moscow, to afford him your full attention, and to put him in contact
with the people and institutions whose help he will require.
I find Moscow in a disgraceful state.
Everywhere, very pale and ill crowds of people.
To hide this reality,
one of the Bolsheviks main weapons is
of course, propaganda, which
is inescapable wherever you go.
A young militant tells me: "You're a man of the past.
I'm a man of the future."
The Bolshevik continues:
"You belong to the capitalist world that is fast collapsing.
"I belong to the Communist world, which will soon triumph.
"Look at Moscow, old and new stands
"side by side and the new is triumphing.
"The Bolshevik Revolution is building a new industrialised Russia,
"where the machine will take the place of God.
"We will prove to the world that communism can build a powerful,
"prosperous state, in which everyone can be happy and not go hungry."
It makes me mad to think that people come here and after being led by
their nose and eating their fill, they go home and say that
the USSR is a paradise.
No one can have any idea of what is going on here, especially in the
countryside, without talking to the peasants who've travelled hundreds
and hundreds of miles to the capital, in search of bread.
In Tverskaya street, a rough, bearded
peasant in a sheepskin coat calls out:
"In the name of God, give to me.
"I'm from Ukraine and there 'hleba niet' - there is no bread.
"We're dying."
I decide to see for myself how the peasants are really living.
I have a difficult task ahead.
Journalists are not even allowed to go to the countryside
and must stay in Moscow.
I go to the British Embassy to ask for advice about how to travel
to Ukrainian villages.
One of the secretaries says to me:
"Don't go there, it's dangerous now there are bandits looking for food.
"But if you really want to go, don't tell any Communist
"or you will be arrested."
They have spread false information.
We must put an end to this and prevent these gentlemen from
travelling anywhere in the USSR.
There are so many spies in this country.
Disregarding this ban, I go to the station in Moscow, where trains
leave for Ukraine.
I buy a ticket for Kharkov, the capital, pretending that I need
to visit a tractor factory.
I get into a dark and foul-smelling wooden train.
I ask questions of my fellow travellers,
but they are silenced by their fear of the OGPU, the political police.
"I'm afraid of talking to you," said one of them.
"You might be a spy."
Halt in a station.
Talk to a group of peasant women.
"We're starving.
"Two months we've hardly had bread.
"We're from Ukraine and we're trying to go north.
"We're dying quietly in the villages."
Why is there a famine in one of the richest wheat growing countries
in the world?
The young Bolshevik I met in Moscow had told me:
"We will, whatever the cost,
"transform the poor peasant Soviet Union
"into a rich and industrialised state.
"We will build factories here and steelworks there.
"We will create a Communist version of the United States.
"We will beat even America.
"Do you know what our weapon is? It's our five year plan."
The young Bolshevik had told me to finance the industrialisation
of the country and to obtain foreign currency,
we only had one solution - produce a lot of wheat and export it.
To achieve their plan, the Bolsheviks decided to seize the land from the
peasants and to transform it into vast collective farms called kolkhoz.
Forced collectivisation of the countryside had just begun.
We were forced to abandon our land and join the kolkhoz.
The Bolsheviks left us only our house, a cow and a few chickens.
It's a dog's life.
It would be better to be buried than be alive in these times.
Why work if we don't have our own land?
Why should I give my horse to others?
Why should drunks and good- for-nothings benefit from my cow?
I'd rather eat them than give them to the government.
by the peasants themselves.
We have also noticed that very often the cattle are voluntarily and
systematically reduced to a state that leaves slaughter
as the only option.
The two peasants next to me tell me that the best amongst them, those who
had previously worked day and night, and those who refused to join the
kolkhoz, were called kulaks.
For the Bolsheviks, kulaks are the enemy.
Those who do not want to follow the plan, those who exploit others.
They are the rich peasants at the top of the social ladder
in the countryside.
That's why, according to them,
the kulak class must be eliminated.
But who are the kulaks?
They might be anyone.
Owning a cow or two or planting a little wheat might be enough.
All, even now, are still afraid of being assassinated or sent away to
Siberia as kulaks, as millions before them.
During my last journey in the USSR, I saw the first food problems.
They had appeared after forced collectivisation, totally
disproportionate requisitioning of grain, the slaughtering of animals
and the deportation of the best farmers.
The plan destabilised the countryside.
"Will there be soup this winter?
"They took our land, our cattle and our wheat.
"We won't have enough seed to plant this year.
"No one can imagine what hunger means.
"We suffered it in 1921 and the sad life is upon us again.
"The future looks bleak."
In some villages, the government requisition of grain has led to
fighting between the peasants and the Communist authorities.
Grain silos are full, but stomachs are empty.
The train travels across the steppes.
Opposite me is a domineering man.
You can easily tell that he's a party member, as most Communists in the
USSR have this ruthless look.
He tells me he's from the political department.
This is a detachment of several thousand brigade members who were
sent into the villages to force the peasants to accept the
Communist measures.
"We are semi-military," he tells me.
"We will crush any opposition."
He's determined to pursue what he considers to be a holy war against
all those who refuse to hand over their grain quotas.
We will not give in anymore.
We give all our wheat to the state and we are starving.
This year, from the very start of the procurement campaign,
we will hide our grain.
If the authorities shoot us, it will still be better than dying a
slow death from starvation.
The armed brigades go from one farmyard to another,
killing all the dogs.
Then they go about collecting all our food.
They search with metal rods, look in
the wood burners, rip up floorboards,
make holes in the walls.
During the search, the brigades ask
where we keep our arms and our grain.
My wife answers that we don't have either.
They torture her.
They put her fingers in the door and close it.
They break her fingers, the blood flows.
She faints.
They pour water on her head to start torturing her again.
They hit her and push a needle under her fingernails.
Because of the Bolshevik violence in the countryside and the abusive
collection of grain quotas, nationalism was strong in Ukraine.
The Ukrainians were the most resistant to collectivisation because
they'd always had a deep rooted connection to their land.
Since this was taken from them at the beginning of the five year plan,
the peasants consider this to be a new form of serfdom.
No longer for the benefit of the Tsars, but for the Bolsheviks.
The nationalists were openly demanding their right to independence
and an end to grain quotas.
If we do not immediately rectify the situation in Ukraine,
we may lose Ukraine.
...under Comrade Kaganovich to the
North Caucasus and under Comrade Molotov to Ukraine.
The kolkhoz farms and villages most active in the sabotage of the state
plan for the supply of grain, will be put on a blackboard.
The following measures will be imposed:
Immediate suspension of the supply of goods and the removal of all goods
available in the shops.
Total prohibition of all trade.
They have put us on the blackboard.
We have no bread.
The cooperative shops cannot sell anything.
There are no matches and no fuel.
We cannot go and buy anything at all.
We are not allowed out of the village.
There are patrols everywhere.
People are swelling up and dying, 15 a day at least.
Pravda has published a completely paranoid speech by Stalin.
He suggesting that Ukrainian peasants have built a vast underground town
overflowing with hidden grain.
Finding it would ensure the prosperity of the USSR.
Stalin has therefore decided to specifically punish Ukraine,
the nationalists and the resistant peasants by confiscating even the
seeds required for the next harvest.
Hunger has become a weapon.
As nothing can be planted, the peasants are starting to leave.
To find something to eat,
they're trying to flee to neighbouring republics.
But Stalin has decided to close Ukraine's borders,
thereby condemning the Ukrainian peasants to a certain death.
...to systematically check all travelling peasants, to immediately
arrest all those trying to flee from Ukraine.
The train stops in a small station.
This is my chance to slip away and enter Ukraine's no-man's land.
I buckle my rucksack with precious food bought in Moscow.
I get out of the train.
I'm alone, ready to start my adventure.
I walk along the railway tracks to avoid getting lost,
because if I go off into the countryside, I may never come back.
The village I arrive at has an unearthly quietness about it.
Not a sound.
Silence.
Two women stop me and invite me into a house.
I ask: "What's happening in the village?"
One of them replies with a single word: "Golod." Famine.
"Even worse than in 1921," she adds.
I ask another peasant woman:
"Potchemu golod?"
Why the famine?
"It's not the fault of nature.
"It's the fault of the Communists.
"They took everything from us."
"In the old days, I would have welcomed you and given you chicken
"and eggs, milk and good white bread.
"In the old days, we fed the world.
"Now we don't even have bread.
"They're killing us."
Kolkhoz members also wander around the steppe looking for rodents.
We have noticed that the starving will eat them raw as soon as
they catch the creature.
We have registered a number of deaths in the fields and in the steppes
while people hunt for rodents.
The bodies are often left a long time without being buried.
We have stopped visiting friends and neighbours.
All our traditions of hospitality and
solidarity have suddenly disappeared.
Everyone is turning in on themselves, retreating into a hole.
Indifference to everything is creeping in, indifference to our
decline and to the death of friends, then of our nearest and dearest.
I walk on until dark.
On arriving in the next village, a man comes up to me and invites
me into his house.
Fear of death looms over the family, as they don't have enough potatoes
to last until the next crop.
I share my white bread, my butter and my cheese.
A young girl says to me:
"Now I have eaten such wonderful things,
"I can die happy."
I stay there that night.
We sleep nine in the room.
In the morning, before leaving, the peasant says to me:
"Things are terrible here.
"But go down to the Poltava district,
"it's far worse.
"You will see hundreds of empty houses.
Some have gone away, but most have died.
People kill children and acquaintances,
even strangers in the street.
Each day that goes by encourages
these people in the idea that
it is perfectly acceptable
to eat human flesh.
My shoes are wearing out from walking along the rough, icy stones
along the railway tracks.
With each step I feel the hard snow and stones through the soles.
In a station I ask again,
each peasant: "Why is there a famine?"
A policeman comes over:
"Move on. Stop talking to him about the famine.
"Can't you see he's a foreigner?"
He turns to me.
"Come here. What are you doing here?
"Show me your documents.
"Follow me. I'm taking you to Kharkov."
The worst visions come to mind.
I think my time is up that I will be tortured in an OGPU prison.
Throughout the journey, I try to impress him, telling him how I
interviewed Lenin's widow and a number of important people
from the Soviet regime.
On arriving in Kharkov, I realised that the policeman is indeed
convinced my arrest would plunge the USSR, Europe and the United
States into a world war.
He decides to take me to a foreign consulate and leave me there,
on the doorstep.
My journey through the villages is over.
In the streets, I see thousands of peasants who have fled the villages
to find food in the towns.
They're begging.
Their pale children cry and hold out their hands as I pass by.
Uncle, give us bread.
People in their thousands start to
queue for bread at 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon,
to be served the next morning when the shops open.
A man tells me there is terror everywhere, famine everywhere.
There is no hope.
A service has been organised to take in children.
These children have been abandoned by their parents, who go back to their
village to die, hoping that someone in the town will take care
of their offspring.
It is undeniable that this famine has been organised to give
the peasants a lesson.
The government in Moscow has indeed organised through relentless
requisitioning, the complete disappearance of all means of
subsistence in the Ukrainian countryside.
Why does the international press not publish anything about this slaughter
organised by the Soviet government?
In the last few weeks, there has been a beginning of Russification
of Ukraine.
Muscovites have been placed in leading positions in Kharkov, and
now Russian is to be taught in the schools.
Officials are even talking of a plan for colonisation.
It's possible that in the very near future, Ukraine may become a
de facto Russian region.
I leave Kharkov.
In the train from Moscow, an inspector comes to pull down the
blinds in the compartment.
I stop him.
"No, let me do it," he says.
-"They throw stones at the train." -"But who does that?"
"The peasants, in protest."
I have to be very careful until I leave Russia,
but I will still ask questions to the people I meet in Moscow.
In a street, a factory worker tells me:
"The five year plan only works on paper and you can't eat numbers.
"I don't believe a word they say in the newspapers.
"They're all lies, lies, lies."
I go to a reception at the Foreign Office to meet the minister,
Maxime Litvinov.
Surprisingly, he knows nothing of my arrest in Kharkov and my journey
through the Ukrainian villages.
He still thinks I work for Lloyd George and asks me to pass on
his respects and greetings,
having always been an admirer.
My evening continues at the Metropole Hotel.
Lights, red, green, blue.
Fountains, balloons.
Waiters in white, wine.
I meet party members and foreign journalists.
Walter Duranty, the famous Moscow correspondent for
The New York Times, is here.
He's charming with me, as he is with all English and American visitors.
Duranty is even considered as the unofficial ambassador for the
United States in the USSR.
I don't trust Duranty.
He asked me to be quiet.
My dear parents, I've just left Moscow.
I'm keen to come home. But on my way I must stop in Berlin.
The situation in the USSR is absolutely terrible.
Famine is almost everywhere and millions of people are
dying of starvation.
Dear journalist friends, thank you for coming to this press conference.
Before I leave for London, I wanted to share with you what I saw and
heard during my journey on foot around the villages in Ukraine.
What did the peasants tell me?
The same cry rang out everywhere.
"There is no bread."
The other sentence I heard throughout my visit was:
"We are all swollen."
I saw the ruination of farming in its grim reality.
Famine is everywhere.
I tramped through a number of villages in the snow of March.
I talked to every peasant I met.
I slept in peasant huts, sometimes nine to a room.
I saw children with swollen bellies.
If the situation is grave now, and if millions are dying in the villages,
what will it be like in a month's time?
The future is even bleaker than the present.
I've just learned, to my astonishment, that Walter Duranty has
telegraphed an article to the New York Times in which he insinuates
that I am a liar and denies all information about a famine
in the USSR.
"Gareth Jones presents a big scare story about famine in
"the Soviet Union,
"but there is no actual starvation
"or deaths from starvation.
"There is, however, widespread
"mortality from diseases
"due to malnutrition.
"It is all too true that the novelty
"and mismanagement of the collective
"farming have disrupted Soviet food production.
"But to put it brutally, you cannot make an omelette
"without breaking eggs."
I wish to respond to Mr. Duranty, who implies that I have
made up a scare story.
Walter Duranty says there is no famine in the USSR.
The censorship of journalists in Moscow has turned them into
masters of euphemism.
So they give famine the polite name of food shortage.
I would also like to congratulate the Soviet Foreign Office for their skill
in concealing the true situation in the USSR.
My dear Margaret,
I know Duranty's description of the situation to be untrue.
He just writes what they tell him to.
That he works for The New York Times,
and last year he won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for his flattering
articles about Stalin's USSR.
He is read and believed.
I'm going home to Wales, to Barry, to my home.
But I will not give up.
I have work waiting for me.
The Daily Express and the Western Mail have commissioned me to write
a series of articles about the USSR and the famine.
I would so like for the world to become aware of the situation in
Ukraine, and for something to be done to alleviate the suffering
of the peasants.
Talk of famine now is called ridiculous.
I have just finished a journey of 250
miles by car through the heart of
Ukraine, and I can assure you that the harvest is splendid.
Babies and the elderly alike look in good health and well fed.
Everywhere I went, the Communists and the peasants say the same thing.
"Now all is well.
"Now we have reserves for the winter.
"Now we have more grain.
"There was much resistance last year, and those who resisted
"suffered bitterly.
"Today, there is no more resistance.
"The Kremlin won its battle."
Comrades of the kolkhoz,
the millions of poor peasants who in
the old days always went hungry,
have become in the kolkhoz, assured of their future.
We can congratulate ourselves on the immense success of building socialism
in the countryside.
We saved no fewer than 20 million poor peasants from ruin and
exploitation by the kulaks.
We have turned them into happy members of the kolkhoz.
Exactly nine months ago today, I left Wales to write about world affairs
for the Manchester Guardian.
I still cannot forget the swollen bellies of the Ukrainian children.
I would have been so pleased if the dozens of articles I wrote on my
return from Ukraine and my numerous conferences, had found a wider
echo within public opinion.
But at that time Western leaders, whilst perfectly well informed of
the situation, looked away.
They were too terrified by Nazi Germany and far too concerned about
being able to continue to import millions of tons of Russian wheat.
I'm currently in Inner Mongolia to investigate the strong tensions
between the USSR and Japan.
There are four Russians with me in the car.
We're driving through uncharted land.
All the maps are bad and the distance is wrong.
We lose our way.
About 7:00 in the evening, I'm tired
and head into my yurt.
Tomorrow, we will cross the land of outlaws.
[GUNSHOTS]
Gareth Jones is no more.
He was shot on the eve of his 30th birthday.
His body, pierced by three bullets, is lying at Pao Chang.
Details of the circumstances of his death remain a mystery.