Diary that exposed Stalin’s famine goes on display

LONDON | The diaries of a British reporter who risked his reputation to expose the horrors of Josef Stalin’s murderous famine in Ukraine are to go on display Friday.

Welsh journalist Gareth Jones sneaked into Ukraine in March of 1933 at the height of an artificial famine engineered by the Soviet dictator as part of his campaign to force peasants into collective farms. Millions starved to death between 1932 and 1933 as the Soviet secret police emptied the countryside of grain and livestock.

Jones’ reporting was one of first attempts to bring the disaster to the world’s attention.

“Famine Grips Russia - Millions Dying” read the front page of the New York Evening Post on March 29, 1933. “Famine on a colossal scale, impending death of millions from hunger, murderous terror … this is the summary of Mr. Jones’s firsthand observations,” the paper said.

As starvation and cannibalism spread across Ukraine, Soviet authorities exported more than a million tons of grain to the West, using the money to build factories and arm its military.

Historians say that between 4 million and 5 million Ukrainians perished in what is sometimes referred to as the Great Famine.

Walking from village to village, Jones recorded desperate Ukrainians scrambling for food, scribbling brief interviews in pencil on lined notebooks.

“They all had the same story: ‘There is no bread - we haven’t had bread for two months - a lot are dying,’ ” Jones wrote in one entry.

“We are the living dead,” he quoted one peasant as saying.

Jones’ handwritten diaries are on display at the Wren Library at Trinity College in Cambridge, where he was a student, until mid-December.

Jones’ eyewitness account had little effect on world opinion at the time. Stalin’s totalitarian regime tightly controlled the flow of information out of the U.S.S.R., and many Moscow-based foreign correspondents - some of whom had pro-Soviet sympathies - refused to believe Jones’ reporting.

The New York Times’ Walter Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, dismissed his article as a scare story.

“Conditions are bad, but there is no famine,” Duranty wrote a few days after Jones’ story was published. Other correspondents chimed in with public denials.

With his colleagues against him, Jones was discredited.

Eugene Lyons, an American wire agency reporter who gradually went from communist sympathizer to fierce critic of the Soviet regime, later acknowledged the role that fellow journalists had played in trying to destroy Jones’ career.

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