Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 14, 4 (Fall 2013): 775–804.

History and Historians

Reporting Stalin’s Famine

Jones and Muggeridge

A Case Study in Forgetting and Rediscovery

Teresa Cherfas

In March 1933, a young Welshman boarded a slow train south from Moscow to Khar´kov, capital of Soviet Ukraine. He had a knapsack full of food, spoke fluent Russian, and was traveling hard (third) class. About 70 kilometers short of his final destination, he got off at a small station and continued his journey on foot. For three days and two nights, he was off the radar of Soviet officialdom. Notebook in hand, he tramped through the frozen wastes of what had once been hailed as the “breadbasket of the world,” recording everything he saw and heard:

I caught up 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 roubles. 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 are doomed to die. You see that field. It was all gold, but now look at the weeds.” The weeds were peeping up over the snow. “Before the War we could have boots and meat and butter. We were the richest country in the world for grain. We fed the world. Now they have taken all away from us.”1

The notebook belonged to Gareth Jones. What he did when he left the Soviet Union two weeks later ought, by any reckoning, to have placed him

On 23 November 2013, a Day of Remembrance in Ukraine will mark the 80th anniversary of the Holodomor, the manmade famine discussed in this article. 1 Gareth Jones, 1933 Soviet diary, National Library of Wales (NLW), Gareth Vaughan Jones Papers (GVJP), ms. B1/15. See also www.garethjones.org for a comprehensive selection of documents from the NLW collection (accessed 18 September 2013).

776 TERESA CHERFAS

among the stars of 20th-century reporting. Instead, when he spoke out, he was dumped on by the very journalists whose profession he exemplified, abandoned by his patrons, and forgotten.

To begin with, it was Jones’s name, more than any other, that was associated with speaking out about Stalin’s famine. True, the Manchester Guardian had broken the story one day before Gareth Jones, in three unsigned articles published on 25, 27, and 28 March 1933 under the byline “An Observer’s Notes.”2 But by an accident of history, their author, Malcolm Muggeridge, was able to reposition himself as the sole champion of the starving, while the public record of Jones’s role languished in newspaper archives and his diaries and letters gathered dust in the family home. So there was little reason to disbelieve Muggeridge when he wrote in his 1973 memoir: “no other foreign journalist had been into the famine areas in the USSR except under official auspices and supervision, so my account was by way of being exclusive.”3

The truth is rather different. On 29 March 1933, Gareth Jones had turned up in Berlin, his notebooks full. He held a press conference at which he described what he had witnessed of the lethal consequences of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. It made headlines in several U.S. papers and was reported in the British press: “Famine Grips Russia. Millions Dying. Idle on Rise, says Briton. Gareth Jones, Lloyd George Aide, Reports Devastation. Tours Farm Areas, Finds Food Gone.”4 (One of the jobs Jones had already packed into his short career was aide to former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.) Jones then went back to England and wrote a front-page article, the first of several under his own byline, for the Daily Express.5 The episode should have launched Jones on a career as stellar as Muggeridge’s, but within two years he was dead—murdered by Chinese bandits in Inner Mongolia, a day short of his 30th birthday.6

But history has a way of righting wrongs. For more than 50 years, Jones’s letters and diaries lay in two leather trunks, one under his mother’s bed and another under the stairs at the old family house in Barry, South Wales. An

2 “The Soviet and the Peasantry; An Observer’s Notes,” Manchester Guardian, 25 March 1933, 13–14; 27 March 1933, 9–10; 28 March 1933, 9–10. 3 Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, 2: The Green Stick (London: Fontana/Collins, 1972), 287. 4 New York Evening Post, 29 March 1933, 1. The Manchester Guardian, the London Morning Post and the Daily Express carried the story on 30 March 1933. On 31 March, the London Evening Standard carried the first famine article signed by Gareth Jones. 5 Daily Express, London, 3–8 April 1933. 6 For an account of the circumstances in which Jones died, see Margaret Siriol Colley, Gareth Jones: A Manchukuo Incident (Newark: N. L. Colley, 2001); and the 2012 BBC documentary film Hitler, Stalin, and Mr. Jones, directed by George Carey.

REPORTING STALIN’S FAMINE 777

attempted burglary in 1987 prompted the family to clear the house and move out Gareth’s unmarried sister Gwyneth, living alone and then in her 90s, for her own safety. Gwyneth Jones bequeathed a bundle of her brother’s papers to the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. Some years later, the family handed over the remaining letters and diaries for safekeeping to the Welsh archive. These documents throw light on a much neglected life and help restore to Gareth Jones some of the glory hitherto heaped on Muggeridge alone.

The origins of the Soviet famine of 1932–33 that Jones and Muggeridge reported lay in the perceived grain crisis of 1928 and the failure of the New Economic Policy to deliver food to the workers and surplus grain for export. The Soviets badly needed the foreign currency generated by grain exports to buy essential machinery for the industrialization program that was the cornerstone of the First Five-Year Plan launched by Stalin in 1928. The collectivization of agriculture was added to the mix in 1929, with Stalin announcing in December that “kulaks would be liquidated as a class.” As Timothy Snyder writes, “In practice, the state decided who was a kulak and who was not.”7 In due course, some 30,000 Soviet citizens would be executed, and in the first four months of 1930, 113,637 people were forcibly deported as kulaks from Soviet Ukraine.8

The regime was badly served by the wildly inaccurate figures of actual production that their inept and inexperienced agents on the ground provided.9 So-called “troikas” were set up in the villages to enforce the new policies with powers to sentence people to death or exile. The necessary grain was procured, but for a price much less than anticipated by the peasant producers. The lesson the peasants drew from the experience was that market prices could no longer be relied on, and they began to hoard grain, which led to an increase in requisition quotas.

By mid-March 1930, 71 percent of arable land in the USSR had been collectivized. The peasants had signed away their land, livestock, farm equipment, and selves to the new collective farms and the Machine Tractor Stations (MTS), which also served as local centers of political control.10 On

7 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 25. 8 Ibid., 26. 9 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (London: Hutchinson, 1986), 87–88.10 Snyder, Bloodlands, 28.

778 TERESA CHERFAS

2 March, Stalin had published an article titled “Dizzy with Success,” which admitted the plan was unpopular, blaming the excesses against the middle peasants on overzealous party activists on the ground. But it was a case of reculer pour mieux sauter, and the campaign was renewed in 1931 with greater political determination.11

During these crucial years of the forging of the Soviet state, Britain had severed its diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in the wake of what became known as the Arcos Affair of 1927. It was not until the reelection of the second Labour government under Ramsey MacDonald in 1929 that relations were restored. As a consequence, Britain had no diplomats on the ground at the launch of the First Five-Year Plan and, according to Michael Hughes, it was this two-year break in British–Soviet diplomatic relations that led to a fundamental failure in British establishment circles to grasp the true nature of the Soviet regime’s policies in rural areas:

The embassy staff were initially inclined to treat collectivisation as an essentially economic affair: an attempt to increase agricultural productivity and output by creating large-scale farms in place of small and supposedly inefficient peasant holdings. Their early dispatches in particular were filled with dry reflections on such arcane technical problems as the supply of tractors etc. It took some time for them to realise the vital political dimension to collectivisation—the destruction of the traditional institutions of rural society and therefore that Soviet power could extend right to the heart of the countryside through their own agents and bodies. … Without comprehending this, embassy staff failed to understand the sheer brutality and violence of the process.12

When the new British ambassador, Sir Esmond Ovey, and his staff arrived in Moscow in early 1930, it was all they could manage to sort out their living and working arrangements in a city whose paucity of goods and supplies, with its hordes of beggars, street pedlars, and vagrant children, they found shocking.13

This was the situation into which Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge now plunged. Profiting from the resumption of diplomatic relations, Jones visited the Soviet Union for the first time on a tourist visa in August 1930. He left with few illusions. As soon as he was away from the censor’s eye, in

11 Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, 158–63.12 Michael Hughes, Inside the Enigma: British Officials in Russia, 1900–1939 (London: Hambledon Press, 1997), 241–42.13 Ibid., 225–28. Embassy staff complained about the extortionate sums demanded by the Soviets for vermin-infested lodgings at the Savoy Hotel, where the food was so disgusting they preferred to eat tinned food.

REPORTING STALIN’S FAMINE 779

Berlin, he sent a letter home on 26 August 1930: “Russia is in a very bad state, rotten, no food, only bread; oppression; injustice. … It makes me mad to think that people like [two words are heavily crossed out in black ink and illegible] go there and come back, after having been led around by the nose and had enough to eat, and say that Russia is a paradise.14 … The winter is going to be one of great suffering there and starvation. The Government is the most brutal in the world.”15

By then, Jones was 25 years old and had recently left Cambridge. He was a brilliant linguist (as well as his First in Russian from Cambridge, Jones had gained distinction in French and German from the University of Aberystwyth), and his parents wanted him to follow an academic career. Instead, he took a short-term contract as a researcher for David Lloyd George, who wanted help in writing his war memoirs. That first trip to Soviet Russia in 1930 changed his fortunes. As soon as he got back from Moscow, the “Chief,” Lloyd George, summoned him to a weekend house party of political movers and shakers at Churt. Jones regaled guests with stories of a country few of them had visited. Through connections made there, he was invited to write three articles for The Times, whose own correspondent filed from independent Latvia’s capital, Riga, to avoid Soviet censorship.16 Sir Bernard Pares, founding father of Russian studies in Britain, and Jones’s external examiner at Cambridge, later wrote: “Lloyd George was as fond of him as I was and would say on his return from such a trip, ‘We must open a fresh bottle of champagne for Gareth.’ ”17

It was all a far cry from the South Wales town of Barry where he grew up. Jones’s niece, Siriol Colley, said she thought he never lost his Welsh accent and probably had something of an inferiority complex at Cambridge.18 But mixing with Lloyd George’s entourage at Churt and at the Reform Club (of 14 On his first trip to Soviet Russia, Jones traveled under the auspices of VOKS (the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad). Unlike most foreign visitors to the USSR, however, Jones spoke fluent Russian and was able to travel unaccompanied and speak to people whom he encountered. Non-Russian speakers were more susceptible to the propaganda offered by organizations such as VOKS. See Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).15 Jones, letter, 26 August 1930, NLW GVJP, ms. B6/2.16 Lord Lothian to Gareth Jones, 23 September 1930: “Dawson writes that he will be delighted to see you about some articles in The Times” (NLW GVJP, ms. 20). The Times published three articles on 13–16 October 1930 under the heading “The Two Russias.” Another set of articles, titled “My Russian Diary,” appeared in the Star on 22, 27, and 29 October. If Jones did keep a diary of his 1930 trip, it is not in evidence among his papers.17 Bernard Pares, A Wandering Student: The Story of a Purpose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1948), 309.18 Interview with Siriol Colley by George Carey, September 2011, for Hitler, Stalin, and Mr. Jones.

780 TERESA CHERFAS

which he became a member in late 1930) turned Jones into an accomplished networker, lunching and dining on a carousel of social engagements. An entry in his diary for 24 July 1930, weeks before his first trip to the Soviet Union, describes one meeting of particular note, with Colonel Thwaites of the Air League:19 “Colonel Thwaites was in a small room, in morning dress, top hat hanging on a peg. He had keen, dark eyes, not very attractive personality, absolutely unscrupulous and cold. He told me how unscrupulous governments are about propaganda. How difficult to get facts about Soviet aviation. He heard that they were going ahead very quickly. … He was going to write to the Admiralty about me. But if I was going to do something for them it had better be at the end of my trip and be careful.”20

Colonel Thwaites was Colonel Norman Thwaites, who, as head of station in New York during World War I for the department of the Secret Intelligence Service then known as MI1c (now known as MI6), had recommended Sidney Reilly (Ace of Spies) for a job to Mansfield Cumming, the head of MI1c in London.21 The British Secret Intelligence Service was still in its infancy then. Everyone was recruited largely through social connections, and it relied on young volunteers from the right background to cooperate out of a sense of duty to King and Country.

There is no account of Jones’s 1930 trip to Russia among his papers, and no direct evidence of whether he did what Thwaites asked. But an entry in his appointment diary for Tuesday, 30 September 1930, a month after his return from the USSR, reveals there was a follow-up: “11.30 Air League.”22 In one of the two small notebooks covering Jones’s 1931 Soviet trip, there are 12 closely covered pages devoted to a meeting at Osoaviakhim, the Society of Friends of Defense and Aviation–Chemical Construction.23 Jones did not draw on 19 The Air League was formed in 1909 to counter “the backwardness and apathy” shown by the United Kingdom in the face of emerging aeronautical developments and to stress the “vital importance from a commercial and national defence point of view of this new means of communication.” Colonel Thwaites was acting secretary general when Jones met him at Astor House. 20 Jones, appointment and engagement diary for 1930, NLW GVJP, ms. B1/4.21 See Norman G. Thwaites, Velvet and Vinegar (London: Grayson, 1932), 181. Andrew Cook, in his Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly (Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2002), 140–49, queries the veracity of Thwaites’s 1932 account, but Reilly did meet Thwaites in New York and did ask him for a position with the British Secret Service. 22 Jones, appointment and engagement diary for 1930, NLW GVJP, ms. B1/4.23 Jones, 1931 Soviet diary, NLW GVJP, ms. B1/11. Osoaviakhim was founded in 1927. Since Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin had been pushing for the adoption of “Socialism in One Country.” The USSR had to be able to defend itself if there was to be no imminent world revolution, and mass mobilization for a civil defense was seen as an essential part of this. For a full study of Osoaviakhim, see William E. Odom, The Soviet Volunteers: Modernization and Bureaucracy in a Public Mass Organization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).

REPORTING STALIN’S FAMINE 781

the information contained in these pages in his published journalism, so it seems a fair assumption that his information found its way back to Colonel Thwaites.24

Over the next three years, Gareth Jones became, almost by accident, quite an established name in British journalism. He had never taken a job on a newspaper, but his political connections and acute understanding of the forces driving history in the early 1930s meant that he found little difficulty placing his articles.25 So when he arrived in Moscow on 5 March 1933, he had commissions to write a series of articles on Russia for The Economist and another three articles for The Times.26

By then, Malcolm Muggeridge was already in Moscow as the temporary replacement for the Manchester Guardian’s permanent correspondent who had taken extended leave. Jones contacted Muggeridge and they met the very next day.27 They were both interested in the worsening situation in the Soviet countryside.

A bumper harvest in 1931 had disguised the impact of Stalin’s dekulakization policy. But the decision to base the next year’s quotas on that year’s yield had doomed the rural population to starvation. The peasants were forced to give up even the seed grain for the next year’s crop to meet the increasingly punitive requisition targets. The next blow came when Stalin decreed that it would strengthen the state if all agricultural production was declared to be state property and any unauthorized collection of food deemed theft, punishable by summary execution. On 7 August 1932, a law was passed according to which a peasant could be shot for picking up a chaff of wheat or a potato peeling from land that had previously been his. In December, internal passports were introduced, making it illegal for peasants to leave the land and travel to find the food they desperately needed. Widespread starvation became inevitable.28

24 He did, however, speak about the Soviets’ fear of attack and of visiting a village 2,000 miles from the frontier, where the inhabitants were so afraid of foreign invasion by air that they kept a large supply of gas masks ready. See “Impressions of Russia: G. Jones’s Lecture,” Manchester Guardian, 24 January 1933, 3. In March 1933, Jones met Malinovskii, general secretary of Osoaviakhim, again and filled some 15 pages with notes of their conversation. Malinovskii told him: “We have become terrifically strong; much stronger … since I last saw you, much stronger.” Jones noted down their new motto: “Zavod krepost´ oborony” (The Factory Is the Fortress of Defense) (1933 Soviet diary, NLW GVJP, ms. B1/15).25 The Times had published another series of three articles titled “The Real Russia” on 14–16 October 1931; the Cardiff Western Mail published three articles about Russia titled “Will There Be Soup?” in October and November 1932. 26 Jones, undated letter to his parents, January 1933, NLW GVJP, ms. 14.27 Jones, 1933 Soviet diary.28 Snyder, Bloodlands, 32–35; Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, 164–88.

782 TERESA CHERFAS

The two young men trying to report this story had much in common. Both were brilliant grammar-school boys with Cambridge degrees, making their way in a Britain where class still counted for everything. Jones had gained entry to the British political establishment through his connection with David Lloyd George; Muggeridge had married into it. Kitty Muggeridge was the favorite niece of Beatrice Webb, married to Sidney Webb, both central figures in the Fabian Society, which attracted the likes of H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Indeed, so well connected were they that when the new Soviet ambassador, Ivan Mikhailovich Maiskii, took up residence in London in 1932, the Webbs became his entrée to the British political establishment.29 Maiskii, like his patron Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov, had counted among the many Russian émigrés living in London when the Russian imperial regime was overthrown in 1917. It was in London that Maiskii first met Litvinov and the Webbs, and it was in London that Litvinov met and married his English bride, Ivy Lowe, who had close ties to the Fabians.30

Before leaving for the Soviet Union in September 1932, Kitty and Malcolm went to pay a visit on “Aunt Bo.” The Webbs had visited the Soviet Union the previous May and were full of praise for what they were to call the “New Civilisation.” “For us it was the laying on of the hands,” Muggeridge wrote in his memoirs: “ ‘Sidney and I,’ Mrs. Webb had told me, ‘have become ikons in the Soviet Union.’ Kitty and I hoped to participate in this sanctity they had acquired.”31 The Muggeridges arrived in Moscow with plans of making a permanent home there, turning their backs on the bourgeois life. But within a month, they were having second thoughts.32

The foreign press corps Muggeridge encountered in Moscow comprised several other journalists who had also traveled to the USSR as though on holy

29 David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, 222–23. David-Fox describes the Fabians as the “quintessence of respectable, successful, establishment figures,” 216. See his chapter “Stalinist Fabians,” 209–12, for a comprehensive account of the way in which the Webbs’ visits to the Soviet Union were perceived by their Soviet hosts. 30 Ivan Maiskii, Journey into the Past, trans. Frederick Holt (London: Hutchinson, 1962), 55, 89; John Carswell, The Exile: A Life of Ivy Litvinov (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 66–67.31 Muggeridge, Green Stick, 228.32 In a diary entry written on 22 September 1932, less than a week after his arrival in Moscow, Muggeridge wrote: “The country is governed by the stiffest dictatorship I’ve ever come across so there is no way of estimating what measure of popular support this grandiose Five Year Plan has—entailing terrible sacrifices, particularly on the part of the poorest people (the peasants).” On 25 November 1932, he wrote, “insofar as I was really enthusiastic about Communism, I feel now completely disillusioned.” See Like It Was: The Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge, selected and edited by John Bright-Holmes (London: Collins, 1981), 19, 49.

REPORTING STALIN’S FAMINE 783

pilgrimage. The American UPI reporter, Eugene Lyons, had arrived in 1928, having spent the previous five years working for two Soviet news organs in the United States.33 He recalls his sendoff in New York: “The farewell party arranged by my friends included the cream of the intelligentsia, with not a deviationist in the company. They were sending off one of their very own, proudly aware of his determination to use the opportunity for spreading the gospel whose fountainhead was in the Kremlin.”34

Once in Moscow, Lyons experienced “the thrill of finding one’s private, esoteric symbols installed in the role of authority!”35 Others who set out with Lyons’s enthusiasm to be at the “gospel’s fountainhead” were Louis Fischer and W. H. Chamberlin, whom Muggeridge had come to replace. All three were to become disillusioned.36 The trouble for Muggeridge was that Chamberlin did not leave immediately, and his growing frustration at not getting copy into the paper was matched by a growing disillusionment with everything he saw around him.37 It was a short step from there to seeing the glaring gap in the way the great Soviet experiment was being reported.

Setting the tone for reporting from Moscow was the New York Times Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty. In May 1932, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the First Five-Year Plan. The judges’ citation read: “Mr. Duranty’s dispatches show profound and intimate comprehension of conditions in Russia and of the causes of those conditions. They are marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and exceptional clarity and are excellent examples of the best type of foreign correspondence.”38

Duranty, a Liverpudlian by birth, had been a reporter in World War I. He had moved to the Soviet Union in 1921, and his reports were peppered 33 Lyons worked first for Soviet Russia Pictorial and later for the TASS news agency. See Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (London: George G. Harrap, 1938), 37.34 Ibid., 49.35 Ibid., 54.36 For a study of five Moscow correspondents during the First Five-Year Plan and the famine—which includes Fischer, Lyons, Chamberlin, and Duranty—see David C. Engerman’s chapter “Starving Itself Great” in his Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 194–243. Lyons charts his own growing disillusionment in his memoir, Assignment in Utopia, published just three years after he left the USSR. For an overview of Louis Fischer’s time as a Moscow correspondent, see James William Crowl, Angels in Stalin’s Paradise: Western Reporters in Soviet Russia, 1917 to 1937. A Case Study of Louis Fischer and Walter Duranty (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982). Fischer was one of six authors of the 1949 volume The God That Failed, in which ex-Communists gave an account of their disillusionment and abandonment of communism. He remained a true believer until the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. 37 Richard Ingrams, Muggeridge: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 57.38 Quoted in Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore, 214.

784 TERESA CHERFAS

with military metaphors and allusions. He later claimed that his wartime experiences were “such a baptism of fire that nothing he saw afterwards in the Soviet Union made him turn a hair.”39 David C. Engerman sees Duranty and the four other Moscow correspondents of his study as belonging to a new journalism created by World War I:

Previous generations of foreign correspondents had followed a strict empirical diet—just the facts—in an effort to achieve journalistic objectivity. Yet, after World War I, … many journalists came to believe the facts were no longer enough. The rise of propaganda, the expansion of censorship, and the invention of public relations meant that news reports were increasingly seen as one-sided. Reporters could no longer simply repeat the news they heard; they now had to evaluate it and place it in a broader context. Practicing journalists and scholars alike expressed this goal in urgent terms: facts without interpretation led to public bewilderment—almost all observers used this word—about international events.40

Muggeridge took much from the foreign journalists he encountered in Moscow, including their clichés. Duranty and others used the fact that the Soviet Union embraced Europe and Asia to give readers an insight into its many Asiatic traits, of which brutality and suffering were a natural part. Muggeridge found his experiences in India gave him the same insight. He remarked in his diary on 16 September 1932: “six years in the East convinced me that mere inefficiency, even mere brutality, are not in themselves a condemnation of anything.”41 Perhaps it was the very fact that Gareth Jones was not a regular newspaperman that kept such moral ambiguities out of both his journal notes and his published articles about the USSR.

By early 1933, stories of the real situation in the Soviet countryside were not only rife on the streets of Moscow but also coming out to the West through various channels—diplomatic cables, expert reports, even occasional pieces in foreign newspapers. But eyewitness accounts were scarce. Eugene Lyons had sent two dispatches in January and February 1933 without traveling out of Moscow. He also alerted two other American journalists, Ralph Barnes and William Stoneman, to the story his secretary had found in a local Rostov newspaper of a secret police “rampage.” Barnes and Stoneman traveled from Moscow to Rostov but were picked up by the secret police and put on the next train back to Moscow. Barnes managed to smuggle a report to his newspaper, the New York Herald Tribune, focusing on the terror in 39 Quoted in ibid., 200.40 Ibid., 206–7.41 Diary entry for 16 September 1932 in Like It Was, 14.

REPORTING STALIN’S FAMINE 785

the Kuban region. His article mentioned “only a limited number of cases of deaths due strictly to starvation” but admitted that there were “many deaths resulting from disease attacking constitutions seriously undermined by lack of sufficient food.” Even though the article had been successfully smuggled out, bypassing the Soviet censor, he repeated Duranty’s euphemisms from the latter’s November 1932 New York Times articles. Despite apprehension by the secret police, his visa was not rescinded.42

Even so, there had been no major articles in the Western press. One reason was the influence of Konstantin Aleksandrovich Umanskii, head of the Soviet Foreign Ministry Press Department and arbiter of whether a resident correspondent’s visa would be renewed. Malcolm Muggeridge had made his number with Umanskii when he first arrived, describing him as “a youngish-looking man … with crinkly hair and a lot of gold teeth,” who “complimented me on my connection with the Webbs.”43 Umanskii had not cut the figure Muggeridge had hoped for: “It had been on the tip of my tongue to tell Oumansky that I was not really a foreign correspondent but a comrade who had come to the USSR to help build Socialism. Somehow, he did not seem to be the man, nor was the occasion apposite; he looked so like a bank manager that he put me more in a mood to ask for an overdraft than for citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.”44 By early 1933, Muggeridge already had plans to leave Russia for good and was forming an idea that before doing so, he must go and see for himself what was happening in the countryside.45

Gareth Jones had arrived at the same conclusion by a different route. His first two trips had been on tourist visas, when he had used his fluent Russian to talk to ordinary people in Moscow and Leningrad and to venture outside the capital, escaping the usual guided tour. On his visit to Russia in 1931 with Jack Heinz II, heir to the “57 varieties,” they had landed at Leningrad, and were met by their interpreter, who told them she had been the guide 42 Ralph Barnes, “Soviet Terrorizes Famine Region by Night Raids for Hidden Grain,” New York Herald Tribune, 6 February 1933. See Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore, 222. Duranty published a six-part series for the New York Times, sent out by letter to avoid the censor, which was critical but stopped short of outright condemnation of the regime’s policies. His combination of military metaphor and euphemistic formulations served as the template for his subsequent writings on the food situation.43 Muggeridge, Green Stick, 238.44 Ibid., 214.45 The notion that he and Kitty could not stay in the Soviet Union became a recurrent theme in Muggeridge’s diary for January 1933. However, Richard Ingrams writes: “It is not clear from Malcolm’s diary at what point he abandoned his plan to live in Russia. One can only assume that it became apparent to both of them at an early stage that it was out of the question” (Muggeridge, 69).

786 TERESA CHERFAS

with George Bernard Shaw’s party just a few weeks earlier.46 GBS visited the Soviet Union for ten days at the end of July, when his 75th birthday was celebrated in grand style. No detail of the tour organized for Shaw’s party was left unsupervised: “Welcoming parties, brass bands, and Soviet functionaries made an extraordinary fuss over Shaw. Although he saw only the land of Oz—the manicured Potemkin Village Russia of staged social progress—he was prepared to think otherwise. He told a Labour Party summer school audience afterwards, ‘I was keeping my eyes open for the things I wanted to see. Things they never thought of shewing me. (I may say at once that all this rubbish of people who say you will only see what they want to shew you is just rubbish.)’ Yet he could travel nowhere to which he wasn’t escorted by Red guides.”47

The contented Russians whom Shaw encountered, many trained for the performances, at seemingly efficient factories, model schools, bustling collective farms, and even sanitized prisons, were pieces of theater, a fantasy spectacle of communism. A lavish banquet, with endless vegetarian dishes for Shaw and seemingly endless speeches, celebrated his birthday on 26 July.

GBS was a willing dupe. Jones was adept at accepting official assistance when he needed access but slipping under the net of surveillance when he wanted to find out how people really lived, what they felt and thought. With fluent Russian, he did not even have to leave Moscow to hear what was happening in the countryside, as Jack Heinz II reported:

Jones translated the following remarks by the servant girl (a peasant) of two old Russian noblewomen living quietly in Moscow: “The peasants are terribly dissatisfied. They have been forced to join the Kolkhozi; they want their own patch of land, their own house, their own cattle and pigs, and to work for themselves. My two cousins worked day and night. With their own hands they made bricks. They built houses, and what happened. They did not want to join the collectives and they were taken away to the Urals, where it is very bad. My other cousin had two cows, two pigs, and some sheep; he owned two huts. They called him a Kulak and forced him to sell everything. Only three hundred roubles did they give

46 Jones had been given the job of escorting Jack Heinz II to the Soviet Union through an introduction made by Ivy Lee in New York. Their trip was written up by Jack Heinz II, with a preface by Gareth Jones, as Experiences in Russia 1931: A Diary (Pittsburgh: Alton Press, 1932) but was published anonymously. A transcript of the full text can be found at www.garethjones.org. The reference to the interpreter appears on 12.47 Stanley Weintraub, “GBS and the Despots,” Times Literary Supplement, 22 August 2011. David-Fox’s chapter “The Potemkin Village Dilemma” in Showcasing the Great Experiment, 98–141, outlines the policy of Soviet kul´tpokaz (cultural show) as a way of influencing foreign visitors to see the Soviet experiment in the best possible light through specially orchestrated guided tours.

REPORTING STALIN’S FAMINE 787

him. In the Kolkhozi, nobody wants to work. In my village, I hear they have murdered two Communists. The peasants cannot kill their cows or their pigs without getting permission from the Natchalnik, the village boss. They were told that if they did not join the Kolkhozi, everything would be taken away from them. Many were sent to Archangel. They eat very little now; they used to eat meat, but not now.”48

Three years after the start of mass collectivization, the amount of grain taken from the countryside by the Soviet authorities had more than doubled.49 In London in December 1932, Jones dined with Paul Scheffer, the Berliner Tagesblatt correspondent who had been refused a reentry visa to the Soviet Union because of his unfavorable reports on the Five-Year Plan. After the dinner, Jones wrote to his parents: “Scheffer’s calamitous predictions about Russia are now coming true. Scheffer told me a lot of interesting things.”50 Jones also had meetings with prominent economists and city bankers, all predicting widespread famine and grave things for the Soviet economy. A brief note in his diary states: “The news in the city coincides with Muggeridge’s point of view and mine.”51 He was following Muggeridge’s reports on the worsening agricultural crisis in the Manchester Guardian. Muggeridge had written a robustly critical article on 12 January 1933, which provided the reference for a similarly stringent leader article on the opposite page.52 Two days later, Muggeridge sent a letter with somebody leaving Moscow to William Crozier, his editor, saying he wanted to make the journey south and would leave at once. He asked for £30 to be deposited into his bank account and, if Crozier agreed, for him to send a one-word telegram: “Go!” The telegram arrived and Muggeridge set off by train for Rostov, one day in mid-February.53

Jones, meanwhile, was planning a double scoop. Since his time as a student in Wales, he had visited Germany every year and had many close German friends. If anything, his German was even more fluent than his Russian. His plan now was to go to Berlin, write some articles from there on what was really happening with Hitler, the newly appointed chancellor,

48 Experiences in Russia 1931, 32.49 Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, 174.50 Jones, letter home, Sunday evening, 4 December 1932, NLW GVJP, ms. 18.51 Jones, appointment and engagement diary 1932, NLW GVJP, ms. B1/8.52 Titled “The Price of Russia’s ‘Plan’: Virtual Breakdown of Agriculture; Officials Shot; The Problem of Food Supplies,” Muggeridge’s article was published in the Manchester Guardian on 9, while the leader article “Whither Russia?” appeared on 8. On 18 January 1933, Muggeridge wrote in his diary: “Crozier has made a great effort with an article of mine, and written a leader on it. He didn’t alter a single word. The article is very critical” (Like It Was, 66). 53 Ingrams, Muggeridge, 64, 66.

788 TERESA CHERFAS

in power.54 Shortly afterward, he would follow up with a trip to the Soviet Union.55 He was still making ferocious use of his political contacts. Among Jones’s letters home is this one, written as he rattled by train through the English countryside: “I am paying all expenses for this journey myself. I remain a member of L. G.’s staff—entre nous at a nominal salary—until end of March; but it is worth everything to me to go to Germany as his secretary—it gives me a wonderful entrée … before long I’ll be in Southampton and then on board. It will be warm and comfortable on board and they are giving me an especially good state room because I’m L. G.’s secretary.”56

By the time the two young journalists met in Moscow, Muggeridge had just returned from the famine-hit areas in the south. His unsigned reports had not yet been published, but he was generous with his information. Jones noted in his diary under the heading “Muggeridge”: “Collapse of Bolshevism. Returned from villages—terrible—dying. No seed for sowing. (Underlined in blue pencil). Practically no winter sowing. Outlook for next year disastrous. End of Party absolutely inevitable.”57

Previously unpublished documents from the Russian Foreign Ministry archives, allied to the revelations in Jones’s notebooks, make possible a radical reassessment of the way in which each achieved his aims. Both Muggeridge and Jones are widely credited with ignoring a ban on travel outside Moscow for foreign journalists, but in neither case is this true. Jones used his political connections to get a special visa and cleverly finessed official arrangements for his trip to Ukraine. He got away with it but paid a heavy price. Muggeridge had the blessing of one of the deputy heads of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (NKID) Press Department, whose agents in Kiev and Khar´kov had been instructed to organize visits and meetings for him; but over the years, after Jones was dead, he promoted a rather different account of his story and garnered no small amount of glory for it.

Jones’s trip was very far from being an ordinary visit. Maiskii, the Soviet ambassador in London, had personally lobbied for it. Maiskii was facilitating a request from Lloyd George to obtain documents from Moscow for his war 54 The Cardiff Western Mail published 12 articles by Gareth Jones about Germany throughout February 1933 under the heading “A Welshman Looks at Europe.”55 Snyder’s Bloodlands showcases Jones’s story precisely because of his unique position as an eyewitness to both Hitler’s and Stalin’s policies in 1932–33, the starting point of Snyder’s study (xvii, 21, 23, 47, 56, 59, 60, 61, 70). 56 Jones, undated letter to his parents, January 1933, NLW GVJP, ms. 14.57 Jones, 1933 Soviet diary.

REPORTING STALIN’S FAMINE 789

memoirs. On 25 January, Maiskii had written to A. F. Neiman, Umanskii’s deputy in the Foreign Press Department: “I was expecting to receive with this post the materials you promised for Lloyd George, but there were none. A great pity. You must not assume that because Lloyd George’s secretary, Gareth Jones, is coming to Moscow you can interrupt the dispatch of these materials to London.” The letter continued:

By the way, on the subject of Gareth Jones. He has his visa but will be in Moscow no sooner than 3–4 March since he is provisionally spending a month in Germany too, from where he is supposed to send Lloyd George various materials for analyzing the present situation there. Lloyd George is sending him to the USSR for the same purpose. Evidently, Lloyd George wants through him to get a feel on the ground for how seriously [to believe] the conversations and writings, now flooding Europe, about the critical situation in the USSR. I urge you to take Jones under your special care, give him sufficient attention, and put him in touch with those people and institutions whose assistance he will need. The impressions Jones forms will to a significant degree determine Lloyd George’s attitude toward the USSR.58

Even three years after the resumption of British–Soviet diplomatic relations, British diplomats in Moscow were at a loss as to how to interpret what was happening there. Largely confined to the two major cities of Moscow and Leningrad, they rarely had an opportunity to see what was going on for themselves, and so the experience of Soviet collectivization was somewhat secondhand. Although some embassy officials were allowed to tour a few of the farms, they were invariably taken to showcase ones, where everything was running smoothly and the workers were well fed.59 Lloyd George was once again counting on his young protégé to be his eyes and ears. Maiskii, for his part, clearly thought Lloyd George was still an influential figure in British politics, for whom it was worth going the extra mile to send his envoy back with good news.

Neiman, to whom Jones was obviously no stranger, was not so sure and wrote back on 4 February 1933:

We will try to carry out your wishes concerning Gareth Jones. His impressions of his visit will be of undoubted significance not only because of his connection to Lloyd George but also because of his connection to a number of newspapers, in particular The Times, which

58 Letter from Ambassador Ivan Maiskii to Comrade Neiman, Press Department of NKID, 25 January 1933, Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii (AVP RF) f. 056 (Otdel pechati), op. 18, pap. 38, d. 9, l. 27. 59 Hughes, Inside the Enigma, 235–36.

790 TERESA CHERFAS

has, on several occasions, taken articles from him of an “editorial” nature and so the position of The Times has itself been influenced by him. In 1930, this influence was mostly positive. Jones’s most recent article (see the Manchester Guardian of 24 January) makes us be on guard that his sympathies have changed.60 It is, of course, our job to persuade him otherwise, but I know Jones a little and am afraid that his impressions will not generally yield to our influence.61

The NKID Press Office worked assiduously to shape coverage of events. The four multilingual censors working in the early 1930s approved every telegram or telephone report before transmission. They also received summaries of articles that had escaped censorship.62 But Neiman’s doubts about Jones came too late. Jones already had his Soviet visa, and his diary and journal notes for March 1933 make it possible to follow his footsteps almost hour by hour. The names and numbers of his Moscow contacts are jotted down everywhere; that of UPI correspondent Eugene Lyons written down twice in the space of as many pages.63 Lyons wrote of him: “An earnest and meticulous little man, Gareth Jones was the sort who carries a note-book and unashamedly records your words as you talk. Patiently he went from one correspondent to the next, asking questions and writing down the answers.”64

On 8 March, Jones had an appointment at the German Embassy. The name “Schiller” is written in his diary.65 “Schiller” was Dr. Otto Schiller, an agricultural expert attaché, who had traveled widely in the Soviet Union’s agricultural regions the previous spring and summer and was therefore a valuable source of current information on the rural crisis.66 Jones’s plan was to visit Ukraine as the guest of a German diplomat in Khar´kov. Khar´kov,

60 On 24 January 1933, the Manchester Guardian published a report on a lecture given by Gareth Jones to members of the Flintshire Committee of the League of Nations Union at Rhyl, North Wales. The report described Jones as “a member of Lloyd George’s staff, who has traveled extensively in Russia,” and reported that he “considered that although the Five-year Plan in Russia had achieved great things, much of its success was only ‘on paper.’ The rock on which it had foundered was the attempt to socialize the peasants which had led to famine conditions and to the ruin of agriculture.” 61 Letter from Neiman to I. M. Maiskii in London, 4 February 1933, AVP RF f. 056, op. 18, pap. 38, d. 9, l. 45.62 Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore, 196.63 Jones, 1933 Soviet diary.64 Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 575.65 Jones, 1933 Soviet diary.66 Otto Schiller accompanied Andrew Cairns, a Canadian agricultural specialist employed by the British Empire Marketing Board, to survey grain production in the Soviet Union. Cairns’s reports, incorporating Schiller’s insights, are published in Marco Carynnyk, Lubomyr Y. Luciuk, and Bohdan S. Kordan, eds., The Foreign Office and the Famine: British Documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932–33 (New York: Limestone Press, 1988).

REPORTING STALIN’S FAMINE 791

until 1934 the capital of Soviet Ukraine, was at the center of the famine-stricken area, geographically and politically, and the German consulate there (and as a consequence its embassy in Moscow) was consistently well informed on the famine situation in Ukraine. Jones bought a train ticket to Khar´kov for Friday, 10 March. In his diary are written the numbers 9.42 at the bottom of the page for that day—the time of the overnight train. A bit higher up the page is an entry in Russian: “½ 5 ч. тов. Уманский Спиридоновка, 17 (Comrade Umanskii Spiridonovka, 17).”67

Spiridonovka 17, a mansion in central Moscow, was the property of the Soviet Foreign Ministry. Foreign Affairs Commissar Litvinov had his private residence there, but its grand rooms were also used for official receptions and meetings. Jones was checking in with the chief press censor, hours before catching his train to Khar´kov.

On the next page, Saturday 11 March, the words, “arr. Kharkoff 9.30” have been crossed out. Underlined below is the name “Brodowski.”68 The cache of documents from the Russian Foreign Ministry reveals that “Brodowski” was the NKID’s main man in Khar´kov, S. I. Brodovskii. Umanskii would have given the name to Gareth at their meeting before he caught his train south; but clearly Jones had never intended to arrive in Khar´kov on that train. He knew the value of the special БЕСПЛАТНО (gratis) Soviet visa in his passport, his fluent Russian would get him out of trouble, and he had the best cover of all—as a guest of the German diplomatic mission in Khar´kov.69 So, instead of staying on the train all the way to his official destination, he got out at a quiet country station and walked for 40 miles through the snowy landscape, passing through 20 villages, talking to peasants along the way and filling his notebooks with their heart-rending tales. “Boy in train asking for bread. I dropped a small piece on floor and put it in spittoon. Peasant came and picked it up and ate it. … I dropped orange peel into spittoon. Peasant picked it up and ate it. Later apple core. Man speaking German, same story. ‘Tell them everybody starving.’ Bellies extended.”

Several pages later, there is this: “All people say same: ‘хлеба нету, все пухлы’ [there is no bread, we are all swollen]. One woman said: ‘We are looking forward to death.’ In one village, all bread had gone, potatoes had just run out and there was only буряк (beetroot) for one month. How can they live till next harvest?” Another peasant told him: “Now people steal much more. Four days ago they stole my horse. Hooligans came. There that’s where I saw the track of the horse. A horse is better than a tractor. A tractor goes and 67 Jones, 1933 Soviet diary.68 Ibid.69 Gareth Jones, passport for 1933 Soviet trip, NLW GVJP, ms. B5/3.

792 TERESA CHERFAS

stops, but a horse goes all the time. A tractor only works in certain times of the year, but a horse you can use all the time. A tractor cannot give manure but a horse can.” Jones continues: “Went into village. ‘There’s no bread here. We’ve had no bread for two months. Each dvor (household) had one or two cows. Now none. There are almost no oxen left and the horses have been dying off.’ There was a young worker in the village. ‘The unemployed are growing and they’re treated like cattle. They’re told to get away and they get no bread card. They’re cutting down men everywhere.’ ” And this, which must have made him smile: “After Stalin, the most unpopular man in USSR is Bernard Shaw.”70

Even as he filled his notebooks with evidence of the famine, he knew that back in Moscow, Umanskii and Neiman believed he was being wined and dined by the German diplomatic mission in Khar´kov. When he did finally reach Khar´kov, Jones sent a postcard home for the Soviet censor’s eye:

Tuesday, March 14th, 1933, KharkoffMy dearest All, Just a short word to say I am having a splendid time

in Kharkoff, staying with the German Consul, who is an uncle of Eric Schuler and who is remarkably kind to me. Tomorrow night we are all going to the Opera to see “Eugene Onegin” (Pushkin) and on Thursday, I shall travel with the German Consul-General on the wonderful train, the “Arrow,” with sleeping-car to Moscow, arriving there on Friday morning, 17th.71

No mention of the three “missing” days. But in his private diary, Jones comments on his night at the opera: “Plenty of lipstick but no bread.”72 The next day, after visiting a tractor factory, Jones caught the night train to Moscow, traveling in style. He and his German companion arrived in time for dinner with the German ambassador.

By then, journalists in Moscow were in a state of high excitement. Six British electrical engineers working for Metro-Vickers had been arrested and charged with sabotage and espionage. The situation was tense, and the foreign press corps was standing by to get good coverage of the trial. That Sunday, there was an NKID reception for foreign journalists at the mansion on Spiridonovka. Gareth’s diary notes: “March 19 met Litvinoff. I don’t trust Duranty. He still believes in collectivisation.”73 In due course, each of these men would exact his revenge on Gareth Jones, but that night Jones walked

70 Extracted from Jones’s Soviet diaries, 1933.71 Jones, postcard, 14 March 1933, NLW GVJP, ms.14.72 Jones, 1933 Soviet diary.73 Ibid.

REPORTING STALIN’S FAMINE 793

off with the prize: the promise of an exclusive interview with Soviet Foreign Affairs Commissar Maksim Litvinov. It was scheduled for 23 March.74

As Jones traveled to Berlin after the interview, the Manchester Guardian was running Muggeridge’s three unsigned articles on his trip into the famine area. The day after the last one was published, 29 March, Jones reached Berlin and held the press conference at which he passed on the story contained in his notebooks to a handful of journalists. It was those revelations, not Muggeridge’s anonymous articles, that had the Soviet Foreign Ministry and its patsies scurrying around in dismay.

The first into action was Walter Duranty. His swift rebuttal, specifically of what Jones had reported, was printed on 31 March 1933, two days after the Berlin press conference: “There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition,” he wrote, repeating his now well-worn formula. Duranty may have won a Pulitzer Prize the previous year for his reporting from Soviet Russia, but this episode sealed his reputation as a cynical Soviet apologist among his journalist colleagues in Moscow, who suspected that such pronouncements were a simple exchange for the access and material comforts he enjoyed at the Kremlin’s behest. Duranty’s motivations for doing the Kremlin’s bidding are not always easy to quantify.75 Harrison Salisbury, who later succeeded Duranty as the New York Times man in Moscow, called him “simply amoral” and wrote that “Machiavelli rather than Marx was Duranty’s private god.”76 Whatever the truth of his motives, Duranty’s senior position as the longest-serving member of the Moscow press corps gave him credence and authority, the Pulitzer gave him celebrity, and the publication for which he wrote was considered a newspaper of record; so when Duranty added his stock phrase “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” to 74 Ibid.75 While much has been written about Duranty being in the pay of the Kremlin, there is no hard evidence that he was. James Crowl cites four of Duranty’s Moscow colleagues as being under the impression that Duranty had struck what W. H. Chamberlin called a “special deal” with the Soviets. By way of corroboration, Eugene Lyons claimed that Mrs. Ivy Litvinov once told him “that she walked in on a scene at the Paris Embassy when Duranty was receiving some cash.” Muggeridge wrote that his friend Cholerton (the Daily Telegraph correspondent) believed that Duranty had put himself at the mercy of the Soviet authorities because of a financial scandal. Duranty did have a Soviet mistress by whom he had a son, and Crowl and S. J. Taylor suggest that this could have compromised him with the Soviet authorities, although Taylor is more sanguine about Duranty’s motives, putting them down to his view of the job of reporter, for which, Duranty believed moral issues were irrelevant. See Crowl, Angels in Stalin’s Paradise, 35–36; and Sally J. Taylor, “A Blanket of Silence: The Response of the Western Press Corps in Moscow to the Ukraine Famine of 1932–33,” 9 (PDF at www.holodomorsurvivors.ca/Genocide.html, accessed 18 September 2013).76 Harrison E. Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times (New York: Times Books, 1980), 460.

794 TERESA CHERFAS

his article about Jones, then dismissed his findings as those of a naïve dilettante, this refutation and denial of the famine carried great weight.77 This pivotal piece of journalism has since been cited in articles about Western reporting of the famine with not even a mention of Gareth Jones as its inspiration.78

Konstantin Umanskii already had the first clue that Jones’s trip had not gone as the authorities had planned. One of the NKID documents, dated 29 March 1933, is a letter from S. I. Brodovskii. Apparently ordered to report back to Moscow, he wrote to Umanskii:

Lloyd George’s secretary, Jones, was here; he looked over the tractor factory and left. The attaché at the German consulate here, von Welck, told me that Jones got off at a station before reaching Khar´kov (evidently Belgorod), and walked 70 kilometers to Khar´kov in order to get acquainted with our countryside. He spent one night of his wanderings with a chairman of a village council and one night with a peasant. Jones stayed here with the Vice-Consul, Ehrte, at the German Consulate. Ehrte has a nephew in New York who works in our Amtorg. This nephew is friendly with Jones. This can all be put down to Ehrte’s hospitality. Jones came to see me and left his visiting card, but we did not speak.79

A copy of the letter was also sent to the Ukrainian State Political Directorate (GPU), evidence that there must be a file on Jones in the archives of the Federal Security Service (FSB), its Russian successor.80

Umanskii went into overdrive. He reined in the permanent Moscow correspondents who were then jockeying for his favor to gain access to the upcoming Metro-Vickers trial. Eugene Lyons, the UPI correspondent, recalled 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

77 Walter Duranty, “Russians Hungry But Not Starving,” New York Times, 31 March 1933. In the article, Duranty mentions speaking with Jones about his foray into the villages of Ukraine. The conversation must have taken place at the NKID reception on 19 March that Jones noted in his diary.78 See, for example, Taylor, “A Blanket of Silence,” 5. This is a shortened version of a chapter of the same name in her Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s Man in Moscow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), in which the author does credit Jones as being the target of Duranty’s article; see also David Malone, “The Ground Mourns—Malcolm Muggeridge and the Ukraine Famine,” The Gargoyle, no. 2 (2004): 10.79 Letter from Brodovskii to Umanskii, 29 March 1933, AVP RF f. 056, op. 18, pap. 38, d. 9, l. 95. O. Ehrte (1876–1943) was German Vice-Consul in Khar´kov.80 My requests in 2011 to the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and FSB for documents relating to Jones’s trip to the Soviet Union in 1933 were unsuccessful.

REPORTING STALIN’S FAMINE 795

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 Umansky’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.81

Lyons, who had arrived in the USSR in 1928 as a pilgrim to the shrine of Communism, left under a cloud, disillusioned, in 1934. But in truth, there was nothing he or the other Moscow correspondents did not know about the famine in March 1933. The meticulous Gareth Jones had in fact written down their every word.82

By the time the Moscow foreign press corps was denouncing Jones, he was back in England, writing his articles for the Daily Express and waiting for the call to Churt to brief the Chief. But the call never came. The Russian Foreign Ministry documents reveal why. After what had been a public relations fiasco for the Soviets, their ambassador in London, Ivan Maiskii, asked to see Lloyd George’s secretary, A. J. Sylvester. After their meeting, Sylvester wrote to Maiskii; a copy of his letter was sent on to Moscow. (The copy is signed S. J. Sylvester; probably a slip by the Soviet embassy typist):

Your Excellency,I immediately reported to Mr. Lloyd George the subject-matter

of our conversation today regarding Mr. Gareth Jones. I am desired by Mr. Lloyd George to say at once that he is extremely annoyed to hear of the action of Mr. Gareth Jones, for during the time he was in his employ, Mr. Lloyd George deliberately refused, not once but on a number of occasions, to allow him to go to Russia. Mr. Gareth Jones was not authorised to represent to you, as you stated he did on or about January 24 last, that he was visiting Russia for and on behalf of Mr. Lloyd George. He went absolutely on his own responsibility and entirely at his own expense. Mr. Lloyd George is communicating at once with Mr. Gareth Jones demanding an explanation of his behaviour, and I am to assure you that, after receiving his reply, Mr. Lloyd George will take the first opportunity of making it quite clear that he had nothing whatever to do with his visit to Russia.83

81 Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 575. 82 Jones’s 1931 and 1933 Soviet notebooks are full of his notes of conversations with the Moscow foreign press corps, including Louis Fischer, Maurice Hindus, Eugene Lyons, A. T. Cholerton, and W. H. Chamberlin. See NLW GVJP, ms. B1/11 and B/15.83 Letter from S. [A.] J. Sylvester to His Excellency, the ambassador of the USSR, dated 8 April 1933, marked “copy,” AVP RF f. 056, op. 18, pap. 38, d. 10, l. 5.

796 TERESA CHERFAS

Lloyd George, who had been delighted with his secretary’s reports from Hitler’s Germany just one month earlier, now washed his hands of Jones.84

One week later, Litvinov wrapped up the whole shameful business. His letter to the Soviet embassy in London, with its reference to Gogol´’s classic satire of Russian provincial bureaucracy, is a tour de force:

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 actual 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 NKID jump into action to satisfy this 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. The embassy could not have been unaware that Johnson is the author of a series of articles in The Times that are quite unfavorable toward us. This alone should have prompted the embassy to handle Johnson with caution and at the very least to check his references with Lloyd George, with whom the embassy’s [good] relations afforded every possibility.85

This was enough to make Gareth Jones persona non grata in the Soviet Union.86 His actions had grave consequences for the permanent correspondents, which can be seen in a communication from Foreign Affairs Commissar Litvinov dated 2 April 1933, just four days after Jones’s Berlin press conference. Titled “Restrictions on the Freedom of Movement by Foreign Correspondents,” it notes: “In the name of the Press Department, foreign correspondents should be advised that in granting permission to enter the USSR, we have in mind that they are coming to Moscow to work and take up permanent residence. Therefore, we consider that they must get permission in advance to visit any other places in the [Soviet] Union.”87

84 On 3 March 1933, after Jones returned from Nazi Germany and before he left for Moscow, Lloyd George wrote to him from Churt: “Dear Gareth, thank you so much for your interesting article … it is a first class piece of writing. The notes from the Unemployed Camps all valuable” (NLW GVJP, ms. 20/32).85 Letter from Litvinov to the USSR Embassy in London, dated 16 April 1933, AVP RF f. 056, op. 18, pap. 38, d. 10, l. 19. 86 In a letter to Margaret Stewart, 11 May 1934, Jones wrote: “inoffensive little Joneski has achieved the dignity of being a marked man on the black list of the OGPU and is barred from entering the Soviet Union. I hear that there is a long list of crimes which I have committed under my name in the secret police file in Moscow, and funnily enough espionage is said to be among them” (NLW GVJP, ms. B6/7).87 Statement of the Resolution of the NKID Collegium, dated 2 April 1933, AVP RF f. 056, op. 18, pap. 39, d. 15, l. 28.

REPORTING STALIN’S FAMINE 797

In other words, the restriction of movements placed on resident correspondents did not come into force until a month after Muggeridge’s trip, by which time he was safely out of the country. Eugene Lyons described what happened, hard on the heels of their denunciation of Jones, when the press corps was told about the new restrictions:

A few days later, we were summoned to the Press Department one by one and instructed not to venture out of Moscow without submitting a detailed itinerary and having it officially sanctioned. In effect, therefore, we were summarily deprived of the right of unhampered travel in the country to which we were accredited.

“This is nothing new,” Umansky grimaced uncomfortably. “Such a rule has been in existence since the beginning of the revolution. Now we have decided to enforce it.”88

Lyons knew that the ban was neither here nor there for the Moscow foreign press corps, but it was convenient: “The circumstance that the government barred us from the afflicted regions may serve as our formal excuse. But a deaf-and-dumb reporter hermetically sealed in a hotel room could not have escaped knowledge of the essential facts. … Whatever doubts as to the magnitude of the disaster may have lingered in our minds, the prohibition itself should have set it at rest.”89

Even the British embassy officials in Moscow were receiving masses of unsolicited, and often anonymous, letters sent by Soviet citizens. One such letter, sent in June 1933, stated: “The population would be glad to eat carrion but there is none to be found. They are digging up horses that have died from glanders, and people are also eating them and finally they have not only invented the method of killing and eating each other but also dig up dead bodies and eat them.”90

The trouble was that from the comparative comfort of the Moscow embassy, British diplomats had difficulty comprehending the sheer scale of

88 Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 576. The issue of when the ban was enforced is the subject of some debate. Engerman (Modernization from the Other Shore, 226) maintains it was enforced after the visit by U.S. journalists Ralph Barnes and William Stoneman to the famine regions; although it is true that there had been a flurry of activity in the NKID before 2 April 1933, the memorandum from Litvinov was definitive. Even Marco Carynnyk, an expert on the Soviet famine, uses the word “discouraged,” not “banned,” in referring to the NKID’s “advice” to foreign journalists. Carynnyk is referring to the memorandum of 5 March 1933 from Sir Esmond Ovey: “All correspondents have been ‘advised’ by the Press Department of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs to remain in Moscow.” See Marco Carynnyk, “The Famine the ‘Times’ Couldn’t Find,” Commentary 76, 5 (1983): 33. 89 Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 572.90 Quoted in Hughes, Inside the Enigma, 243.

798 TERESA CHERFAS

the tragedy unfolding in the countryside. William Strang, an embassy official, heard mention of up to ten million peasant deaths as a result of collectivization and its aftermath but seems to have found it hard to accept that this “fantastic figure” could be accurate.91

But what then was the truth about Muggeridge’s famine journey? His own account of that trip changed with time. The first version is in his unsigned article of 27 March 1933 in the Manchester Guardian, in which he wrote: “In Rostov, I had a letter of introduction and found myself in a large car with a guide.”92 By the time he wrote his 1973 memoir, Chronicles of Wasted Time, he writes that he decided: “the best thing to do would be to have a go at visiting the agricultural areas in the Ukraine and Caucasus myself. … Then, one could still, in theory at any rate, buy a railway ticket like anyone else. … I had no contacts, no transport, nowhere to go; the moment one arranged these amenities, one was back in Oumansky’s charge.”93

Ten years later, in 1983, Muggeridge gave an interview to Marco Carynnyk: “Malcolm Muggeridge explained … that when he decided to investigate the famine everyone in Moscow was talking about, he simply bought a train ticket and without informing the authorities set off for Kiev and Rostov … [he left Moscow] without making any kind of plans or asking for permission.”94 Finally, in October 1987, when S. J. Taylor interviewed Muggeridge, it came out like this: “The only person who had actually defied the ban was the implacable Malcolm Muggeridge.”95

New documents from the Russian Foreign Ministry bring clarity to Muggeridge’s tale: they also reveal the surprising tendency of the Foreign Ministry’s Press Department then to give Western journalists the benefit of the doubt by facilitating their forays into the afflicted regions in response to the flimsiest show of interest in witnessing the success of the Plan in action. A policy of persuasion to win Westerners over would appear to have been as prevalent in questions of reporting as it was in the more general cultural politics of the time. The Soviets believed that all visitors to their country were more than ready to be persuaded of the system’s unassailable merits. All they needed to do was roll out the red carpet and keep them from looking left and

91 Ibid., 244. The figure of ten million was Walter Duranty’s, quoted in a British Embassy Dispatch. See Taylor, “A Blanket of Silence,” 7.92 Unsigned article, Manchester Guardian, 27 March 1933. Muggeridge did visit a German agricultural concession in the Kuban´ district near Rostov. It is possible that the letter of introduction, the car, and guide were German.93 Muggeridge, Green Stick, 281, 286.94 Carynnyk, “The Famine the ‘Times’ Couldn’t Find,” 32.95 Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 233.

REPORTING STALIN’S FAMINE 799

right. For the most part, as in the notable cases of George Bernard Shaw and the French Radical Party leader Édouard Herriot, they were right.96

The NKID Press Department seemed willing to go to considerable lengths to win over Muggeridge too. Perhaps his connection with the Webbs was still a vouchsafe of his good socialist intent, despite all evidence to the contrary. Two documents dated 15 February 1933 are letters from Comrade Neiman. One is to Brodovskii in Khar´kov:

Dear Stefan Ioakhimovich,I don’t know whether Muggeridge (the Manchester Guardian

correspondent) about whom we telegraphed you, has already been by. If not, then he evidently decided to visit Khar´kov on his way back from Rostov, where he went with the same goal—to study the situation in the kolkhozes—and accordingly will most likely be calling on you in 5–10 days.

The fact that Muggeridge is inclined in his reports to emphasize the unfavorable aspects makes it especially necessary to take care of him in as serious a manner as possible and, in particular, to arrange a meeting or meetings with qualified comrades.

I add that Muggeridge (here as the temporary replacement for the Manchester Guardian’s permanent correspondent Chamberlin, who is on leave for a few months) is not an unequivocally hostile person. He is first and foremost an intellectual without set views, who knows little about us and understands even less. The negative nature of his first impressions and reports to a significant extent can even be explained by this, that he generalizes the negative aspects of things that catch his eye and does not see or understand those aspects in which we are strong.97

The other letter of the same date is to Shenshev, the NKID agent in Kiev:

In the nearest future, the Moscow correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, Muggeridge, should call on you with a letter from us; he is on his way to the North Caucasus and Ukraine to acquaint himself with the situation in the kolkhozes.

As you know, the Manchester Guardian is of exceptional importance to us [for conveying] correct information about the USSR to England.

96 On the dazzling show put on for Herriot during his visit to Soviet Ukraine in August–September 1933, see Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, 314–15. This was a last-ditch Soviet exercise in dispelling famine scare stories, and no expense was spared. On Herriot’s obliging response, see David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, 99. Katerina Clark also deals with the magnetic attraction for foreign cultural and political figures of the USSR in the 1930s in Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).97 Letter from Neiman to S. I. Brodovskii, dated 15 February 1933, AVP RF f. 056, op. 18, pap. 39, d. 15, ll. 10–10 ob.

800 TERESA CHERFAS

Besides which, Muggeridge, who has only recently come here … is inclined to emphasize the more unfavorable aspects in his articles.98

The last two paragraphs repeat exactly the description of Muggeridge’s frame of mind outlined in the letter to Brodovskii.

Far from having “no contacts” and “nowhere to go,” Muggeridge had informed the NKID Press Department of his planned trip, whether he needed to or not.

Neiman had asked to see Muggeridge in Moscow in late January. He was dismayed at Muggeridge’s volte-face. Muggeridge described Neiman as “looking like a Rabbi, with a fringe of beard all round his face.”99 He records their meeting in his Moscow diary for 29 January 1933:

Then went to see Nehman. He had asked to see me. “Your article in the Manchester Guardian,” he said, “was terrible.”100 Thus we began. … He had a dusky, slight face. … Having hurried back and sweated he smelt rather. Not a bad sort of fellow. I think he likes me. He seemed genuinely upset that I should have turned against the “interesting experiment.” … The pose I adopted was: “Of course, I’m not interested in journalism. I’d much rather live in Russia for a year and never write a word about it. But since I must write to earn money, then I’ve no alternative but to write what seems to me to be true. I’m a man of moods. An artist, not a journalist. Atmosphere is what counts with me; and I just use facts to fill in a picture because newspapers demand it; won’t pay otherwise.” We parted good friends.101

Neiman must have thought Muggeridge could still be brought round, unlike Jones, whom he thought “unyielding.” But that diary entry of Muggeridge’s continued: “As I left him I had a yearning to get away from Russia … to leave it all to come to its wretched end without me watching and writing about it.”102

The reply to Neiman from Shenshev in Kiev, dated 1 March, is a sorry lament:

Your letter about Muggeridge’s arrival in Kiev arrived with some delay. More important, the letter describing his character and asking us to give him assistance arrived on the day of his departure [actually, after he had left]. … We did not manage to meet him on the day of his arrival. I

98 Ibid., l. 11. 99 Muggeridge, Green Stick, 247.100 Muggeridge, “The Price of Russia’s ‘Plan.’ ” 101 Like It Was, ed. John Bright-Holmes, 71.102 Ibid., 72.

REPORTING STALIN’S FAMINE 801

was also busy the next day, and he was free only toward the end of that day, so we managed to meet only on the eve of his departure. All we could do was summarize his time in Kiev. One can only guess that his trip gave him much “material.” He arrived just as there had been an accident at the electricity station. The whole town was in darkness. His hotel was in darkness and rather cold (because of the darkness, they weren’t heating it). Generally speaking, his impressions couldn’t have been too wonderful. He visited the Lavra Museum, where he was shown everything and was pleased with it all. He visited the nearest kolkhoz. I was told that he found the kolhozniks at lunch. He asked whether they ate better or worse since collectivization. They replied, “Better.” He told them that what they had wasn’t bad and that he had seen a lot worse in the North Caucausus. We could have organized his trip and his time here much better if, in the first place, he had gone through Intourist and, more particularly, if I had known in advance of his arrival. I only found out late about his visit to the kolkhoz, in the same way as I was late to find out about his arrival in Kiev. Moreover, he is planning to visit Kiev in the summer, and we agreed that he would tell me well in advance. I think it would not be a bad idea to send him here in the summer. He would take away an entirely different impression of the collective and state farms in the summer season, when there is much work being done. He told me briefly about his impression of the collective farm, told me about his conversation with the chairman and the collective-farm workers, stating that he had come away with a good impression. He asked me about the most pressing tasks for the villages. I set them out for him schematically, in the spirit of the Central Committee Plenum resolution, the session of the Central Executive Committee, and so on. He asked about Kiev, about industry in Kiev, about Ukrainian culture. Our conversation took place by candlelight, which did not lend itself to a lengthy talk.

Muggeridge’s stated plan to return in the summer was a patent lie, since he knew that even before his reports were published he would be gone from Moscow for good. It worked as an emollient, however, and Shenshev thought that lessons could be learned from the experience: “Not being briefed in time, I could not prepare all the essentials for his trip. I could not organize meetings for him with qualified comrades. I could not even arrange a reception for him on time, learning so late of his arrival. All this should be taken into consideration for the future.”103

The results of Muggeridge’s time in Kiev appeared in his Manchester Guardian article of 27 March 1933, in which he described “A Kolkhoznik’s

103 Letter from Shenshev to Neiman, 1 March 1933, AVP RF f. 056, op. 18, pap. 39, d. 15, ll. 14–14 ob.

802 TERESA CHERFAS

Life.”104 It is a vivid report of appalling conditions and resigned despair, quite different from the story Shenshev was told, either by the men who briefed him or by Muggeridge himself. Whatever else, Muggeridge was a good reporter.

As a result of this trip, Muggeridge was the only Western journalist who was in a position to refute the criticism leveled against Jones, particularly by the egregious Walter Duranty. When Muggeridge was attacked by the left-leaning British intelligentsia, who saw in Soviet communism a more attractive alternative to both faltering capitalism and to fascism, Gareth Jones spoke out in his defense, applauding Muggeridge for “having been the first journalist to have informed Britain of the true situation of Russian agriculture.”105 Jones evidently asked Muggeridge to support him against Duranty; among the Gareth Vaughan Jones Papers in Wales there are two letters from Muggeridge, sent from Switzerland. The first is dated 17 April 1933. In it Muggeridge mentions that he is composing a 3,000-word pamphlet for the Ukrainian Bureau, a Ukrainian information and lobbying center active in London from 1931 to 1940. “I’d very much like to see your articles on the agricultural situation before I do this,” he writes to Jones, “because it would strengthen the thing for me to be able to quote someone else. Would you send them to me, or any sort of rough draft of them, from which I could quote?” He then asks for a cutting of Walter Duranty’s article and says he will gladly write “a letter of protest” to the New York Times. He ends the letter, “I am afraid I shan’t be in England for some time because I’ve got to get on with a book.”106

But in fact Muggeridge did nothing. By 29 September, when he wrote to Jones again, Duranty had become the first foreign journalist to be allowed back into the famine-stricken areas.107 Muggeridge was now able to write: “since (Duranty’s) message refers to the new harvest I can’t challenge him on firsthand knowledge. That is to say, I know and you know that his description of things in the Caucasus is untrue; but he can always retort, ‘You haven’t seen and I have.’ ”108 Muggeridge had procrastinated for the best part of six months, and now his inaction was justified; the worst was indeed over.

By then, Jones was languishing in Wales, having lost favor with most of his patrons in London. In her 1987 interview, S. J. Taylor asked Muggeridge what had happened to him after his stories on the famine had been published: 104 Unsigned article, Manchester Guardian, 27 March 1933.105 Gareth Jones, letter to the Manchester Guardian, 8 May 1933. Jones also mentions columns in the newspaper attempting to discredit “the views of your correspondent.”106 Letter from Malcolm Muggeridge to Gareth Jones, 17 April 1933, NLW GVJP, ms. 20.107 The New York Times printed seven further reports by Duranty between 11 and 20 September 1933. 108 Letter from Malcolm Muggeridge to Gareth Jones, 29 September 1933, NLW GVJP, ms. 20.

REPORTING STALIN’S FAMINE 803

“As to his own fate, he seemed more surprised than anything else. ‘Me?’ he asked, querulous, still awed by the injustice of the thing. ‘What happened to me?’ Then he remembered. ‘Oh, yes. I couldn’t get work.’ ”109

In fact, he had begun work in Switzerland on the book that he had mentioned in his first letter to Gareth Jones. By the time Winter in Moscow was published in 1934, Jones was on what turned out to be his last long journey, a freelance trip to the Far East, seeking a scoop in Inner Mongolia, seen then as a likely flashpoint between the Soviet Union and Japan.110 Had he taken Winter in Moscow to read on his travels or had he left England oblivious of it? If he had read it, what would he have made of Muggeridge’s mocking references to the character of Wilfred Pye, who “travelled third class because he wanted, as he explained in his articles, to be in contact with real people and not with officials or visitors or privileged persons”?111 Or had Muggeridge merged their two characters into one when he went on to write of Pye: “Letters of introduction took him from place to place. ‘I don’t want you to show me anything,’ he said everywhere. ‘Just lend me a motor-car and an interpreter and I’ll see for myself.’ ”112 What is in no doubt is that Muggeridge used Jones’s story when he wrote of the three peasants who “watched Pye eat an orange” and throw the peel into a spittoon.113 Yet never once did Muggeridge refer publicly to his source.

The true nature and extent of the famine were not really known for another 50 years. As for numbers, the UPI’s Eugene Lyons recalled: “In 109 Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 206.110 Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, creating the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932. The USSR’s strategic interests in Outer Mongolia were threatened by further Japanese expansion into Inner Mongolia, and Stalin was concerned about his defense capability on the USSR’s long border with China, whose weak territorial position was compromised by the Japanese. Japanese expansionism in Asia also served as a stimulus in securing U.S. diplomatic recognition of the USSR in November 1933; Roosevelt banked on a mutuality of interests with the USSR in Asia in a bid to secure U.S. strategic goals there. In the period leading up to Jones’s murder in 1935, tensions among Japan, the USSR, and China were at such a pitch that contemporary international specialists would have put money on there being a Russo-Japanese War. It was to discover what was happening on the ground at that crucial time that Jones had ventured into Inner Mongolia in July 1935. 111 Malcolm Muggeridge, Winter in Moscow (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1934), 139. In his unsigned Manchester Guardian article of 27 March 1933, Muggeridge wrote that he “had been traveling ‘hard,’ ” yet his memoir (The Green Stick, 285) has him traveling first-class: “My journey to Rostov remains in my mind a nightmare memory. The worn railway compartment, with glasses of tea endlessly served; other passengers coming and going, mostly party officials (who else could afford to travel first-class?), very companionable and amiable and ready to listen to my rudimentary Russian, but shutting up at once if I brought up the subject of what was going on outside.” 112 Muggeridge, Winter in Moscow, 140.113 Ibid. The episode of the orange peel is on 140–41.

804 TERESA CHERFAS

the foreign colony estimates of famine deaths ranged from one million up; among Russians from three millions up. Russians, especially communists, were inclined to cite higher figures through a sort of perverse pride in bigness; if it called for Bolshevik firmness to let a million die, it obviously called for three times as much firmness to kill off three million.”114

Lyons published his memoir two years after Gareth Jones was murdered. Sir Bernard Pares, Jones’s academic mentor, found out about his death, “from a newspaper poster, while passing from one station to another in London.”115 Jones was headline news. But in a footnote Pares commented that Jones had been barred from going to Russia again because of his reports on a “local famine.”116 The cover-up by the Soviets and their apologists had done its job.117

London, UKteresa.cherfas@gmail.com

114 Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 574.115 Pares, A Wandering Student, 311.116 Ibid.117 It was not until 1986 that Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow was published. Only in November 2008, on the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor, were Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge posthumously awarded the Ukrainian Order of Freedom for exceptional services to the country and its people.