Thanks to NRO
Black Minorca Pullets
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HISTORY
A Hero of Our Time
Gareth Jones, 20th-century truth-teller
ANDREW STUTTAFORD
The notebooks worn, creased, and drab, but haunting nonetheless
lay carefully set out on a table in the lobby of a New York hotel.
Their pages were filled with notes, comments, and calculations, jotted
and scribbled in the cursive, spiky script once a hallmark of pre-war
Britain's educated classes.
Their author had, it seems, wandered through a dying village deep
within Stalin's gargoyle empire. "Woman came out and started crying.
'They're killing us. In my village there used to be 300 cows and now
we only have 30. The horses have died. How can I feed us all?'" It was
the Ukraine, March 1933, a land in the throes of a man-made famine,
the latest murderous chapter in Soviet social engineering. Five, six,
seven million had died, maybe more. As Khrushchev later explained, "No
one was counting."
But how had these notebooks found their way to a Hilton in Manhattan?
Some years ago, in a town in Wales, an old, old lady, older than the
century in which she lived, was burgled. As a result, she moved out of
her home. When her niece, Siriol, came to clear up whatever was left,
she found a brown leather suitcase monogrammed "G.V.R.J." and, lying
under a thick layer of dust, a black tin box. Inside them were papers,
letters, and, yes, those notebooks ("nothing had been thrown away"),
the last records of Gareth Jones "G.V.R.J." Siriol's "jolly,"
brilliant Uncle Gareth, a polyglot traveler and journalist. In 1935 he
had been killed by bandits in Manchuria, or so it was said. All that
was left was grief, his writings, and the memory of a talented man cut
down far, far too soon.
Seven decades later, as I sat talking to Siriol Colley in that midtown
hotel, looking through Jones's papers, his press clippings, even his
passport, it was not difficult to get a sense of the uncle she still
mourned. Welsh to his core, he was typical of those clever, energetic
Celts who did so well in the British Empire, restless (all those visa
stamps, Warsaw, Berlin, Riga . . .), ambitious, and enterprising.
Despite his youth, Jones seemed to get everywhere, Zelig with a
typewriter. On New Year's Day 1935, for instance, he was in San
Simeon, Kane's Xanadu itself, side by side with William Randolph
Hearst. Earlier, we find him on a plane with Hitler ("looks like a
middle-class grocer"), and, why, there he is, smiling on the White
House lawn in April 1931, standing just behind a hopeless, hapless
Herbert Hoover.
Above all, this man who reportedly charmed his captors in Manchuria by
singing them hymns, was what the Welsh call "chapel": pious,
hardworking, teetotal, a little priggish, and armed with a sense of
right and wrong so fierce that it gave him the strength to report the
truth of what he saw, at the cost, if need be, of his career and, some
would say, his life. Jones's politics were typically chapel too,
steeped as they were in the Liberal traditions of Welsh Nonconformism.
Ornery, high-minded, pacifist, egalitarian, a touch goofy, a little
bit utopian, Jones was just the sort of Westerner who might have been
attracted to the Soviet experiment. And so he was initially. In a
1933 article for the London Daily Express, Jones recalled how "the
idealism of the Bolsheviks impressed me . . . the courage of the
Bolsheviks impressed me . . . the internationalism of the Bolsheviks
impressed me," but "then," he added, "I went to Russia."
A WITNESS
And there, for Jones, everything changed. His accounts of his visits
to the USSR (the first was in 1930) are a chronicle of mounting
disillusion. Reading them now, particularly the occasional attempts to
highlight some Soviet achievement or other, it's easy to see that this
young Welsh liberal, this believer, wanted to trust in Moscow's
promise of a radiant future, but Communist reality dismal, savage,
and hopeless kept intruding. Unlike many who came to inspect the
people's paradise, he reported on its dark side too. For Jones, there
was no choice. It was the truth, you see.
By the autumn of 1932, Jones was sounding the alarm ("Will There Be
Soup?" and "Russia Famished Under the Five-Year Plan") about the
catastrophe to come: "The food is not there." Early the next year, he
returned to Moscow to check the situation for himself, took a train to
the Ukraine, and then walked out into the wrecked, desperate
countryside. Once back in the West, he wasted no time, not even
waiting to get back home before telling an American journalist in
Berlin what he had seen: Millions were dying.
Soviet denials were to be expected. That they were supported by the
New York Times was not. The newspaper's Moscow correspondent, Walter
Duranty, reassured his readers that Jones had been exaggerating. The
Welshman was, he condescended, "a man of a keen and active mind . . .
but [his] judgment was somewhat hasty . . . It appeared that he had
made a forty-mile walk through villages in the neighborhood of
Kharkhov and found conditions sad." Sad not much of an adjective,
really, to describe genocide.
The Times's man, who had won a Pulitzer the previous year for "the
scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional
clarity" of his reporting from the Soviet Union, did not share Jones's
sense of "impending doom." Yes, "to put it brutally," omelettes could
not be made without breaking eggs, but there had been "no actual
starvation or deaths from starvation." Duranty came, he claimed, to
this conclusion only after "exhaustive enquiries about this alleged
famine situation," but other discussions probably influenced him more.
The big story in Moscow in the spring of 1933 bigger by far than the
death of a few million unfortunate peasants was the pending show
trial of six British engineers. Courtroom access and other cooperation
from Soviet officialdom would be essential for any foreign journalist
wanting to satisfy the news desk back home. That would come at a
price. The price was Jones.
Jones's jottings, circa 1933
Eugene Lyons, another American journalist in Moscow at the time, later
explained that "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. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most
surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly
garnered . . . were snowed under by our denials." According to Lyons
(not always, admittedly, the most reliable of witnesses, but the
essence of his tale rings true), a deal was struck at a meeting
between members of the American press corps and Konstantin Umansky,
the chief Soviet censor. "There was much bargaining in a spirit of
gentlemanly give-and-take . . . before a formula of denial was worked
out. We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in round-about
phrases that damned Jones as a liar. The filthy business having been
disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski." Spinning a famine
was, apparently, thirsty work.
Undaunted by the attacks on his accuracy, Jones intensified his
efforts. There were articles in the Daily Express, the Financial
Times, the Western Mail, the London Evening Standard, the Berliner
Tageblatt, as well as a lengthy letter to the Manchester Guardian in
support of Malcolm Muggeridge, who had, like Jones, told the truth
about the famine and, like Jones, been vilified in return (suggestions
that there was starvation in the USSR were, said George Bernard Shaw,
"offensive and ridiculous"). In a letter published by the New York
Times in May 1933, Jones hit back at Walter Duranty. The reports of
widespread famine were, he wrote, based not only on what he had seen
in the villages of the Ukraine, but also on extensive conversations
with other eyewitnesses, diplomats, and journalists. After a few
polite remarks about Duranty's "kindness and helpfulness," the tone
turned contemptuous. Directly quoting from Duranty's own dispatches,
Jones charged that censorship had turned some journalists into
"masters of euphemism and understatement . . . [They] give 'famine'
the polite name of 'food shortage' and 'starving to death' is softened
down to read as 'widespread mortality from diseases due to
malnutrition.' . . . Mr. Duranty says that I saw in the villages no
dead human beings nor animals. That is true, but one does not need a
particularly nimble brain to grasp that even in the Russian famine
districts the dead are buried . . . [T]he dead animals are devoured."
Moscow responded by barring Jones from the USSR. He was cut off for
good from the site of the story he had made his own. Duranty received
a rather different reward. Some months later he accompanied the Soviet
foreign minister on a trip to America, a journey that was to culminate
in FDR's decision to extend diplomatic recognition to the Communist
regime, a decision that was fκted, fκted in that famine year, with a
celebration dinner at New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel, at which
Duranty was honored with cheers and a standing ovation. On Christmas
Day 1933 came the greatest prize of all an interview with Stalin
himself. Well, of course. It was a reward for work well done. Duranty
had, said the dictator, "done a good job in . . . reporting the USSR."
INTO ASIA
But history had not yet finished with Gareth Jones. The young Welshman
possessed, explained David Lloyd George, the former prime minister for
whom Jones had, some years before, worked as an aide, "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."
So, it's no surprise to find him in Japan in early 1935, interviewing,
questioning, snooping, and perhaps attracting the sort of attention
that could turn out to be fatal. By July that year he was heading
through the increasing chaos of northern China toward
Japanese-controlled Manchuria (Manchukuo). On July 26, Jones updated
the narrative he was writing for the last time. He was, he wrote,
"witnessing the changeover of a big district from China to Manchukuo.
There are barbed-wire entanglements just outside the hotel. There are
two roads . . . [O]ver one 200 Japanese lorries have traveled; the
other is infested by bad bandits." Two days later, the bandits struck.
Jones was kidnapped. He was murdered two weeks later. It was the eve
of his 30th birthday.
We will probably never know who was ultimately responsible for Jones's
death. There had been a ransom demand, and so, perhaps, this was just
a kidnapping that went horribly wrong. There are, however, other
possibilities. The Japanese would certainly not have welcomed a
Westerner watching the takeover of yet another Chinese province, and
there is some evidence that the kidnappers were under their control.
It's also intriguing to discover that one of Jones's contacts in those
final days was linked to a company now known to have been a front for
the NKVD, Stalin's secret police. To Lloyd George, only one thing was
clear: "Gareth Jones knew too much."
And if he knew too much, the rest of the world understood too little.
For decades, like the dead whose story he told, this lost witness to a
genocide seemed doomed to be forgotten, a family tragedy, a footnote,
but now that's changing. Jones is at last returning to view, thanks in
no small part to the efforts of the indefatigable Siriol Colley, the
author of a book about her uncle and a second is on the way.
(Colley's son Nigel has also set up a website:
www.colley.co.uk/garethjones/index.html.)
One thing, however, has not changed. On December 4 last year, not long
after the Pulitzer committee decided that Duranty should retain his
prize, Colley wrote to the New York Times asking whether the paper
could at least issue a public apology for the way in which its Moscow
correspondent had smeared Jones. She's still waiting.
Mr. Stuttaford is a contributing editor of National Review Online.
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