VSn recent years much has come to light about my great-uncle, the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones (1905-1935). Its central role was hailed in the disclosure of the 1932-1933 famine, organized by Stalin in Ukraine, in the Kuban [zone géographique du sud de la Russie, située à l’est de la Crimée] and in Kazakhstan. Until the publication in 2005 of the book by my mother, Margaret Siriol Colley, entitled More Than a Grain of Truth (“more than a grain of truth”, untranslated), little was known about Gareth outside of his family.
Agnieszka Holland’s film mr jones [L’ombre de Staline] (2019) and the documentary Bloody harvests. 1933, the famine in Ukraine (2023), by Guillaume Ribot and Antoine Germa, made his person and his work known to a wider audience. But there are some embarrassing truths in his story that those who make a point of telling it today seem determined to ignore. My family appreciated the recent call to honor his name published on April 16 by The world and offering to posthumously award him a Pulitzer Prize. A way to make it a champion in the fight against “fake news”. But by erasing certain salient details from his biography, these authors are mistaken.
Determined to reveal to everyone the great famine that was raging in Ukraine, Gareth Jones had to “navigate on sight” between the two great revolutionary ideologies of his time: Bolshevism and Nazism. If we mention the well-known fact that in February 1933 he boarded a plane with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, we omit to add that, on the same day, he was also present at the podium of a Nazi rally, where Hitler spoke to him, and that he then dined alone with Goebbels. He wrote in his diary: “A smart young man. Tells me terrible things about the Soviet Union. »
Useful to Germany
It was during his first trip to the USSR, in 1930, that Gareth observed these “terrible things”. Speaking Russian, he had heard and remembered a lot. Unlike the Western intellectuals, “fellow travelers” who visited the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, he had not been “led by the nose” by officials, and what he saw of the regime’s violence against its own citizens came as no surprise to him. Even before making his final and decisive trip to Soviet Ukraine, he was aware of the famine raging there and knew that it was the desired result of a policy of confiscating grain production. It was a question of forcing the peasants to submit to collectivization, or to die. Gareth’s goal was to tell an eyewitness account of a tragedy that foreign newspaper correspondents in Moscow were simply not covering.
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