Gareth Jones: Eyewitness to the Holodomor

Now available in paperback! Gareth Jones (1905-1934), the young Welsh investigative journalist, is revered in Ukraine as a national hero and is now rightly recognised as the first reporter to reveal the horror of the Holodomor, the Soviet Government-induced famine of the early 1930s, which killed millions of Ukrainians. Determined to alert the world to this suffering, and to expose Stalin's policies and prejudices towards the Ukrainian people, Jones published numerous articles in the UK and the USA (New York Evening News and Chicago Daily News). But soon he saw his credibility and integrity attacked by Soviet sympathizers, most famously by Moscow-based Walter Duranty of the New York Times. The following year, Gareth Jones was killed by bandits while travelling in Japanese-controlled China. There remain strong suspicions that Jones' murder was arranged by the Soviets. *** "Extraordinary...Jones' articles...caused a small sensation...Because [his] notebooks record immediate impressions and describe events as they were happening, they have an unusual freshness...in the past two decades, the fate of the two journalists has been slowly reversed. Duranty's work has become controversial; in 2003, the Pulitzer committee debated whether to retrospectively withdraw his prize...[whilst] Jones' reputation has revived thanks to the Ukrainian government's broader efforts to tell the history of the famine...the establishment of a Ukrainian state simply makes Jones seem less marginal, more central, more important."Ã?Â?-- Anne Applebaum, The New York Review of Books, April 7, 2016 Issue *** "This excellent book serves as a warning to journalists not to be taken in by official sources and political ideology but to report what they actually learn through their own efforts. Gamache deserves commendation for his research and careful reconstruction of Jones' reportorial journeys."Ã?Â?-- Prof. Maurine H. Beasley, College of Journalism, Univ. of Maryland [Subject: Biography, History, Media Studies, Soviet Studies, Genocide Studies]