Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

  This position made Duranty enormously useful to the regime, which went out of its way to ensure that he lived well in Moscow. He had a large flat, kept a car and a mistress, had the best access of any correspondent, and twice received coveted interviews with Stalin. But the attention he won from his reporting seems to have been the primary motivation for Duranty’s flattering coverage of the USSR. Whereas Clyman’s writing struck few chords, Duranty’s missives from Moscow made him one of the most influential journalists of his time. Many of the men who would become part of Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘Brains Trust’ were looking for new economic ideas and had a deep interest in the Soviet experiment; several had visited Moscow in 1927, where they were granted a six-hour interview with Stalin. Duranty’s accounts chimed with their general worldview and attracted wide attention: in 1932 his series of articles on the successes of collectivization and the Five Year Plan won him the Pulitzer Prize. Soon afterwards, Roosevelt, then the governor of New York, invited Duranty to the governor’s mansion in Albany, where the Democratic presidential candidate peppered him with queries. ‘I asked all the questions this time. It was fascinating,’ Roosevelt told another reporter.63

  But as the famine worsened, controls tightened still further. In 1933 the Foreign Ministry minders, having learned their lesson from Clyman and her companions, began requiring correspondents to obtain permission and submit a proposed itinerary before any journey. All requests to visit Ukraine or the North Caucasus were refused. The sole French correspondent in Moscow received permission to cover Herriot’s visit in the summer of 1933 only after he agreed to remain within the party of the former French prime minister, keep to the planned route, and write about nothing other than the events carefully prepared by the Soviet state. The censors also began to watch dispatches for covert reporting on the famine. Some phrases were allowed: ‘acute food shortage’, ‘food stringency’, ‘food deficit’, ‘diseases due to malnutrition’, but nothing else.64 In late 1932, Soviet officials even visited Duranty at home, making him nervous.65

  In that atmosphere few correspondents were inclined to write about the famine, although all of them knew about it. ‘Officially, there was no famine,’ wrote Chamberlin. But ‘to anyone who lived in Russia in 1933 and who kept his eyes and ears open, the historicity of the famine is simply not in question’.66 Duranty himself discussed the famine with William Strang, a diplomat at the British Embassy, in late 1932. Strang reported back drily that the correspondent for The New York Times had been ‘waking to the truth for some time’, although he had not ‘let the great American public into the secret’. Duranty also told Strang that he reckoned ‘it quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food’, though that number never appeared in any of his reporting.67 Duranty’s reluctance to write about famine may have been particularly acute: the story cast doubt on his previous, positive (and prize-winning) reporting. But he was not alone. Eugene Lyons, Moscow correspondent for United Press and at one time an enthusiastic Marxist, wrote years later that all foreigners in the city were well aware of what was happening in Ukraine as well as in Kazakhstan and the Volga region:

  The truth is that we did not seek corroboration for the simple reason that we entertained no doubts on the subject. There are facts too large to require eyewitness confirmation … There was no more need for investigation to establish the mere existence of the Russian famine than investigation to establish the existence of the American depression. Inside Russia the matter was not disputed. The famine was accepted as a matter of course in our casual conversation at the hotels and in our homes. In the foreign colony estimates of famine deaths ranged from one million up; among Russians from three million up …68

  Everyone knew – yet no one mentioned it. Hence the extraordinary reaction of both the Soviet establishment and the Moscow press corps to the journalistic escapade of Gareth Jones.

  Jones was a young Welshman, only twenty-seven years old at the time of his journey to the USSR in 1933. Possibly inspired by his mother – as a young woman she had been a governess in the home of John Hughes, the Welsh entrepreneur who founded the city of Donetsk – Jones studied Russian, as well as French and German, at Cambridge University. He then landed a job as a private secretary to David Lloyd George, the former British prime minister. At the same time he began writing about European and Soviet politics as a freelancer, making short trips in and out of the USSR, which put him in a different position from the Moscow correspondents who needed the regime’s approval in order to keep their residence permits. On one of those trips, in early 1932 before the travel ban was imposed, Jones journeyed out to the countryside (accompanied by Jack Heinz II, scion of the ketchup empire) where he slept on ‘bug-infested floors’ in Soviet villages and witnessed the beginnings of the famine. Months later he travelled to Frankfurt-am-Main in the entourage of Adolf Hitler – the first foreign correspondent to have access to the newly elected Chancellor of Germany.69

  In the spring of 1933, Jones returned to Moscow, this time with a visa granted him largely on the grounds that he worked for Lloyd George (it was stamped ‘Besplatno’ or ‘Gratis’, as a sign of official Soviet favour). Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London, had been particularly keen to impress Lloyd George and had lobbied on Jones’s behalf. Upon arrival, Jones first went around the Soviet capital, meeting with other foreign correspondents and officials. Lyons remembered him as ‘an earnest and meticulous little man … the sort who carries a note-book and unashamedly records your words as you talk’.70 Jones met Umanskii, showed him an invitation to pay a visit to the German Consul-General in Kharkiv, outlined a plan to visit a German tractor factory, and asked to visit Ukraine. Umanskii agreed. With that official stamp of approval, Jones set off south.71

  He boarded the train in Moscow on 10 March. But instead of travelling all the way to Kharkiv, Jones got off the train about forty miles north of the city. Carrying a backpack filled with ‘many loaves of white bread, with butter, cheese, meat and chocolate bought with foreign currency from the Torgsin stores’, he began to follow the railway track towards the Ukrainian capital.72 For three days, with no official minder or escort, he walked through more than twenty villages and collective farms, seeing rural Ukraine at the height of the famine, recording his thoughts and impressions in notebooks that were later preserved by his sister:

  I crossed the border from Great Russia into the Ukraine. Everywhere I talked to peasants who walked past. They all had the same story.

  ‘There is no bread. We haven’t had bread for over 2 months. A lot are dying.’ The first village had no more potatoes left and the store of buriak [beetroot] was running out. They all said: ‘The cattle are dying, nechem kormit’ [there’s nothing to feed them with]. We used to feed the world & now we are hungry. How can we sow when we have few horses left? How will we be able to work in the fields when we are weak from want of food?’

  Then I caught up [with] a bearded peasant who was walking along. His feet were covered with sacking. We started talking. He spoke in Ukrainian Russian. I gave him [a] lump of bread and of cheese. ‘You couldn’t buy that anywhere for 20 rubles. There just is no food.’

  We walked along and talked. ‘Before the War this was all gold. We had horses and cows and pigs and chickens. Now we are ruined … We’re doomed.’73

  Jones slept on the floor of peasant huts. He shared his food with people and heard their stories. ‘They tried to take away my icons, but I said I’m a peasant, not a dog,’ someone told him. ‘When we believed in God we were happy and lived well. When they tried to do away with God, we became hungry.’ Another man told him he had not eaten meat for a year.

  Jones saw a woman making homespun cloth for clothing, and a village where people were eating horse meat.74 Eventually, he was confronted by a ‘militiaman’ who asked to see his documents, after which plainclothes policemen, no doubt OGPU, insisted on accompanying him on the next train to Kharkiv and walking him to the door of the German cons
ulate. Jones, ‘rejoicing at my freedom, bade him a polite farewell – an anti-climax but a welcome one’.75

  In Kharkiv he kept making notes. He observed thousands of people queuing in bread lines: ‘They begin queuing up 3–4 o’clock in the afternoon to get bread the next morning at 7. It is freezing: many degrees of frost.’76 Jones spent an evening at the theatre – ‘Audience: Plenty of lipstick but no bread’ – and spoke to people about the political repression and mass arrests that were rolling across Ukraine at the same time as the famine:

  ‘They are cruelly strict now in the factories. If you are absent one day, you are sacked, get your bread card taken away & cannot get a passport.’

  ‘Life is a nightmare. I cannot go in the tram, it kills my nerves.’

  ‘It is more terrible than ever. If you say a word now in the factory, you are dismissed. There is no freedom …’

  ‘Everywhere persecution. Everywhere terror. One man we knew said: “My brother died, but he still lies there & we don’t know when we’ll bury him, for there are queues for the burial.” ’

  ‘There is no hope for the future.’77

  He seems to have tried to call on Umanskii’s colleague in Kharkiv, but never managed to speak to him. Quietly, Jones slipped out of the Soviet Union. A few days later, on 30 March, he appeared in Berlin at a press conference probably arranged by Paul Scheffer, the Berliner Tageblatt journalist who had been expelled from the USSR in 1929. Jones declared that a major famine was unfolding across the Soviet Union and issued a statement:

  Everywhere was the cry, ‘There is no bread. We are dying.’ This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, Central Asia …

  In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided. I stayed overnight in a village where there used to be 200 oxen and where there now are six. The peasants were eating the cattle fodder and had only a month’s supply left. They told me that many had already died of hunger. Two soldiers came to arrest a thief. They warned me against travel by night as there were too many ‘starving’ desperate men.

  ‘We are waiting for death’ was my welcome: ‘See, we still have our cattle fodder. Go farther south. There they have nothing. Many houses are empty of people already dead,’ they cried.

  Jones’s press conference was picked up by two senior Berlin-based American journalists, in the New York Evening Post (‘Famine Grips Russia, Millions Dying, Idle on Rise Says Briton’) and the Chicago Daily News (‘Russian Famine Now as Great as Starvation of 1921, Says Secretary of Lloyd George’).78 Further syndications followed in a wide range of British publications. The articles explained that Jones had taken a ‘long walking tour through the Ukraine’, quoted his press release, and added details of mass starvation. They noted, as did Jones himself, that he had broken the rules that held back other journalists: ‘I tramped through the black earth region,’ he wrote, ‘because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.’79 Jones went on to publish a dozen further articles in the London Evening Standard and Daily Express, as well as the Cardiff Western Mail.80

  The authorities who had showered favours on Jones were furious. Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, complained angrily to ambassador Maisky, using an acidic literary allusion to Gogol’s famous play about a fraudulent bureaucrat:

  It is astonishing that Gareth Johnson [sic] has impersonated the role of Khlestakov and succeeded in getting all of you to play the parts of the local governor and various characters from The Government Inspector. In fact, he is just an ordinary citizen, calls himself Lloyd George’s secretary and, apparently at the latter’s bidding, requests a visa, and you at the diplomatic mission without checking up at all, insist the [OGPU] jump into action to satisfy his request. We gave this individual all kinds of support, helped him in his work, I even agreed to meet him, and he turns out to be an imposter.

  In the immediate wake of Jones’s press conference, Litvinov proclaimed an even more stringent ban on journalists travelling outside Moscow. Later, Maisky complained to Lloyd George, who, according to the Soviet ambassador’s report, distanced himself from Jones, declared that he had not sponsored the trip and had not sent Jones as his representative. What he really believed is unknown, but Lloyd George never saw Jones again.81

  The Moscow press corps was even angrier. Of course, its members all knew that what Jones had reported was true, and a few were already beginning to look for ways to tell the same story. Malcolm Muggeridge, at the time the correspondent for the Manchester Guardian – substituting for Chamberlin, who was out of the country – had just smuggled three articles out of the country via diplomatic bag. The Guardian published them anonymously, with heavy cuts made by editors who disapproved of his critique of the USSR, and they were largely ignored: they clashed with bigger stories about Hitler and Germany. But the rest of the press corps, dependent on the goodwill of Umanskii and Litvinov, closed ranks against Jones. Lyons meticulously described what happened:

  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 formulations of equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials … There was much bargaining in a spirit of gentlemanly give-and-take, under the effulgence of Umanskii’s gilded smile, before a formal denial was worked out. We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that damned Jones as a liar. The filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski’.82

  Whether or not such a meeting actually ever took place, it does sum up, metaphorically, what happened next. On 31 March, just a day after Jones had spoken out in Berlin, Duranty himself responded. ‘Russians Hungry But Not Starving’, read the headline of The New York Times. Duranty’s article went out of its way to mock Jones:

  There appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with ‘thousands already dead and millions menaced by death and starvation’. Its author is Gareth Jones, who is a former secretary to David Lloyd George and who recently spent three weeks in the Soviet Union and reached the conclusion that the country was ‘on the verge of a terrific smash’, as he told the writer. Mr. Jones is a man of a keen and active mind, and he has taken the trouble to learn Russian, which he speaks with considerable fluency, but the writer thought Mr. Jones’s judgment was somewhat hasty and asked him on what it was based. It appeared that he had made a forty-mile walk through villages in the neighborhood of Kharkiv and had found conditions sad.

  I suggested that that was a rather inadequate cross-section of a big country but nothing could shake his conviction of impending doom.83

  Duranty continued, using an expression that later became notorious: ‘To put it brutally – you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ He went on to explain that he had made ‘exhaustive inquiries’ and concluded that ‘conditions are bad, but there is no famine’.

  Indignant, Jones wrote a letter to the editor of The Times, patiently listing his sources – a huge range of interviewees, including more than twenty consuls and diplomats – and attacking the Moscow press corps:

  Censorship has turned them into masters of euphemism and understatement. Hence 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’.

  And there the matter rested. Duranty outshone Jones: he was more famous, more widely read, more credible. He was also unchallenge
d. Later, Lyons, Chamberlin and others expressed regret that they had not fought harder against him. But at the time nobody came to Jones’s defence, not even Muggeridge, one of the few Moscow correspondents who had dared to express similar views. As for Jones himself, he was kidnapped and murdered by Chinese bandits while reporting in Mongolia in 1935.84

  ‘Russians Hungry But Not Starving’ became the accepted wisdom. It also coincided nicely with the hard political and diplomatic considerations of the moment. As 1933 turned into 1934 and then 1935, Europeans grew even more worried about Hitler. Édouard Herriot was only one of several French politicians, including former prime ministers Jean-Louis Barthou and Pierre Laval, who believed that the rise of Nazism required a Franco-Soviet alliance.85 In the British Foreign Office, Laurence Collier thought a British-Soviet alliance might be necessary too. In answer to a query by a Member of Parliament, he explained:

  The truth of the matter is, of course, that we have a certain amount of information about famine conditions … and that there is no obligation on us not to make it public. We do not want to make it public, however, because the Soviet government would resent it and our relations with them would be prejudiced.86

  The Poles, who had very detailed information on the famine from multiple sources, also remained silent. They had signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR in July 1932; their policy of truce and cold peace with their Soviet neighbours would backfire badly in 1939.87

  By the end of 1933 the new Roosevelt administration was actively looking for reasons to ignore any bad news about the Soviet Union. The president’s team had concluded that developments in Germany and the need to contain the Japanese meant it was time, finally, for the United States to open full diplomatic relations with Moscow. Roosevelt’s interest in central planning and in what he thought were the USSR’s great economic successes – the president read Duranty’s reporting carefully – encouraged him to believe that there might be a lucrative commercial relationship too.88 Eventually a deal was struck. Litvinov arrived in New York to sign it – accompanied by Duranty. During a lavish banquet for the Soviet Foreign Minister at the Waldorf Astoria, Duranty was introduced to the 1,500 guests. He stood up and bowed.