WWalking through rural Ukraine in 1932, having eluded his Communist Party chaperone, Gareth Jones witnessed disturbing deprivation. People were starving, fighting each other tooth and nail for a single loaf of bread. Bodies lay in the street until they were piled up and carted away on wagons. While its own citizens suffered, the Soviet Union was continuing to export grain, projecting an image of prosperity to the West. Recent estimates have suggested that around 4m people perished in 1932 and 1933, around 13% of the Ukrainian population, in what is known today as the Holodomor (“killing by hunger”). At the time, though, few believed Jones’s reports; many politicians, diplomats and journalists tried to discredit him.
Russia's War Against Ukraine
The Economist: “Mr. Jones” tells the story of the man who exposed the Ukrainian famine
A shot of 'Mr. Jones' Ukrainian movie, describing Holodomor events.
