Mr. Lu Xun said: "A true warrior, dare to face the bleak life, dare to face the dripping blood. "Yes, in the history of ancient and modern China and foreign countries, the most precious and precious people are those who dare to tell the truth in the face of the truth. In the face of the truth, many people choose to see people and talk about people, and see ghosts and talk about ghosts. But there are also those who bravely stand up and tell the truth and pay a huge price for it.
Gareth Jones, a young journalist from Wales, came to Ukraine alone in 1933 to find out the details of the Great Famine in the Soviet Union. Since then, his life has changed completely, and he has lost his precious life for this. But through his efforts, the inside story of the Great Famine in Ukraine was finally revealed.
01 Flowing Golden Years
It all started in 1928. Although the Soviet Union at that time had recovered its economy to its pre-World War I level after the implementation of the New Economic Policy, it was still a backward agricultural country on the whole. Ninety-nine percent of the country's cultivation depends on animal power and manpower, and large-scale industry is left blank, and the total industrial output value is only one-eighth of that of the United States and half of that of Germany. After the October Revolution, the Soviet Union has been under imperialist siege, and in order to get rid of the fate of imperialist interference again, the Soviet Union must vigorously develop heavy industry and complete industrialization and agricultural collectivization in the shortest possible time. Thus, the first five-year plan of the Soviet Union was released.
But it is not easy to complete such a large-scale construction, one is to have technology, the other is to have funds, these two things the Soviet Union did not have. It was also the soviet union's destiny that in October 1929, the year of the first five-year plan of the Soviet Union, an unprecedented economic crisis broke out in the capitalist world. The Great Crisis severely damaged the economy of the capitalist world, but also provided a good opportunity for the industrialization of the Soviet Union.
During the economic crisis, the backlog of products in Western countries was accumulated, and in order to get rid of the crisis, the capital, technology and talents of Europe and the United States began to move to the Soviet Union to find a way out. In the West, mainly with the technical support of the United States, a series of large enterprises such as steel plants, hydropower stations, automobile factories, tractor factories, petroleum, and metallurgy in the Soviet Union mushroomed.
In 1931, the Soviet Union imported one-third of the world market's machinery and equipment, and by 1932, that proportion had risen to one-half. Among them, half of the machinery and equipment exported by the United States was sold to the Soviet Union, while 90% of the machinery and equipment of the United Kingdom was sold to the Soviet Union. Under the economic interaction between the major Western powers and the Soviet Union, the relations between the two sides heated up rapidly, and many European and American countries chose to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
With a good internal and external environment, by the time the first five-year plan of the Soviet Union was completed in 1932, the Soviet Union had initially established a relatively complete national economic system, and the achievements of the Soviet Union impressed the world.
02 Good friend of the Soviet people
Unlike the desperate Western capitalist world, the Soviet Union at that time was the only major country in the world with a rapid economic development. Because of the rapid development of the country, the image of the Soviet Union began to improve in the eyes of the world, and even 100,000 American skilled workers chose to immigrate to the Soviet Union.
In order to publicize the great achievements of soviet socialist construction, Stalin welcomed Western journalists to Moscow, and Walter Duranti, editor-in-chief of the Moscow section of the New York Times, was the most famous one.
Duranti holds numerous titles: an expert on Soviet issues, an admirer of Stalin, a prominent journalist for The New York Times, and even the reputation of a leftist fighter in the press.
After the October Revolution of 1917, Westerners began to be curious about this new and mysterious country. Duranti also grasped this point and made a big fuss.
From 1921 he was based in the Soviet Union as a correspondent for The New York Times. Through a nuanced observation of the country, coupled with his sensitivity as a journalist, he succeeded in his early reporting that Comrade Stalin would rise to the pinnacle of power and that Trotsky would eventually be destroyed! What happened later was exactly what he said, which established his international reputation.
In 1931, Duranti won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Journalism with a series of 13 articles in the New York Times praising the Soviet Union's five-year plan. Duranti finally reached the pinnacle of a journalist, fame and fortune.
03 Discover the truth
It was at this time that our protagonist, Gareth Jones, appeared. He was also a journalist and, because of his multilingualism, worked as a foreign adviser to Lloyd George, the leader of the British Liberal Party. At that time, the economic miracle of the Soviet Union was amazing, but Jones learned through some channels that from the economic data report, the Soviet Union should have gone bankrupt long ago, on the contrary, their industrial expenditure was still increasing, and there was no stagnation at all. Jones wondered where the money for soviet development came from. Where does financial support come from?
In addition, Jones also heard sporadically about the famine in Soviet Ukraine. So, with all kinds of doubts and layers of arrangements, Jones applied for a media visa and came to Moscow as a journalist.
On March 5, 1933, the 28-year-old Jones arrived in Moscow. He went to Duranti, the editor-in-chief of The New York Times' Moscow division, but after several encounters with Duranti, Jones quickly figured out the shocking facts.
He found that the reporters here were all under surveillance and grounding, not only unable to leave Moscow, but also mysteriously followed. The communication between colleagues was almost to the point of silence.
In such a high-pressure environment, journalists are also ignorant of the truth. They either become official mouthpieces or simply indulge themselves in indulging in the pleasures of drunken fans.
Despite the difficulties, Jones managed to interview some diplomats and journalists privately. They secretly told Jones that "not just Ukraine, but many places are starving to death..." Five days later, a thoughtful Jones quietly traveled to Ukraine by train to find out the truth.
In snowy Ukraine, Jones got off the train in the town of Stalino and smuggled it across the country on foot. Along the way, unaccompanied by overseers, he saw everything in the dark forest: he saw at first sight people slumped on the snow; Jones's grain parcels were scattered on the ground, and the crowd rushed up to scramble like hungry wolves; there was hunger and cold everywhere, the people were not happy, the snow was full of corpses, and it was impossible to tell whether they were frozen to death or starved; and there was a terrible cannibalism of human flesh.
Jones wrote in his diary:
"I walked through 12 collective farms and the cries were everywhere... No bread, we haven't had bread for more than two months. Farmers are eating cow feed with only a month's supply left. They told me that many people have died of starvation and many are dying! "Well-meaning farmers remind me not to go out at night because there are already too many people who are hungry to despair ... They are very tolerant of desperate things... ..."
Faced with a hellish Ukraine on earth, Jones nibbled on the bark of a tree that was difficult to swallow, and recorded it all on camera.
Jones' whereabouts were finally revealed in the interview, and he was arrested inside Ukraine and deported.
On March 29, Jones held a press conference on his return to Berlin, and he published a truthful article with the headline: "Russia under the domination of hunger." Since then, more than a dozen Western mainstream media, including the London Evening Standard, the New York Evening News, the Chicago Daily News, and the London Morning Post, have published Jones's articles, causing a sensation in Europe and the United States.
04 Behind the truth
Some people will ask, what happened to Ukraine back then? Is Jones' report true? Let's cut through the fog of history and see what happened to the Soviet Union at that time.
After Lenin's death, Stalin theoretically proved that socialism could be built into socialism in the Soviet Union first, and it was imperative to give priority to the development of heavy industry and to make the Soviet Union an industrial power in the short term. How easy is this for a long-term poor and weak agricultural country?
But Stalin had a way. In 1928, he said at the Central Committee Plenum: "We cannot and cannot rely on the plundering of the colonies for industrial development funds, as the imperialist countries did, and it is impossible and unwilling to borrow slave foreign debt, but can only rely on internal accumulation." ”
How to accumulate internally? One way is to implement a "scissors difference" policy. That is to say, the state buys agricultural products at low prices and sells industrial products to farmers at high prices, that is, farmers pay tribute for the industrialization of the country in the form of scissors difference in the price of industrial and agricultural products.
That is to say, in order to get the funds needed for the development of heavy industry, the peasants' trouser pockets were hollowed out in the form of "scissors difference" to complete the primitive accumulation. In 1923, compared with 1913, farmers needed 2.8 times the amount of agricultural products in order to exchange for the same amount of industrial goods. Since then, the scissors difference has become more and more severe, and in 1940 compared with 1926-1927, the price of industrial products increased 5. 5 times, while the price of agricultural products increased by only 2. 32 times, the "scissors difference" expanded by 95. 8％。
This idea was complemented by the collectivization of agriculture in the SOVIET Union. At that time, in order to solve the problem of insufficient grain and raw materials in the process of large-scale industrialization and change the backward mode of production in the countryside, the Soviet Union launched a vigorous agricultural collectivization campaign.
But the soviet way of doing its work was simple and crude, and as a result, it led to the revolt of the peasants, represented by the kulaks, and the Soviet government suppressed them as class enemies.
On the other hand, the Soviet Union stepped up the export of grain in exchange for industrial production equipment, excessively increasing the amount of grain requisitioned in the grain-producing areas, while the collective farms adopted extraordinary means to complete the grain procurement task, and the grain collection team became a grain snatching team, and the little bit of emergency rations left in the farms and peasants' homes were also taken away.
Finally, after the famine, in order to maintain its good image in the world, the Soviet Union imposed a tight seal on the news of the famine and strictly prohibited people from going out to beg for food, which made the famine situation worse.
As a result, various factors combined to have a superimposed effect, which led to the appalling famine in Ukraine. According to statistics, the total number of deaths is between 3 million and 7 million.
05 Masquerade Life
The Great Famine in the Soviet Union at that time was not only in Ukraine, but also in the Urals, West Siberia, the North Caucasus, the Central Black Earth and other places. The Soviet authorities did not want the news to leak out, believing that it would affect the image of the Soviet Union and the economic assistance of Western countries to the Soviet Union. The Western countries were having a good feeling for the Soviet Union at that time, and the two sides were fighting fiercely, and they did not believe that such a thing would happen in the Soviet Union.
Many intellectuals of the time had a beautiful vision of the Soviets' "great social experiment," and Jones's fierceness offended their ideals, so they refused to acknowledge Jones's reports and launched a loud rebuke.
Take the big-name journalist Duranti, who said in the New York Times on page 1 of November 15, 1931, "There are only a few crop failures, no famine or real hunger, and there can be no." ”
On December 9, 1932, he said on page 6 of The New York Times:
"Enemies and foreign commentators can say what they want, and tired and depressed people at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Soviet people are basically in line with the Kremlin's plan, and it is believed that this is worth supporting!"
After Jones revealed the truth, Duranti wrote in the New York Times on August 23, 1933: "Any report of famine in the Soviet Union today is exaggerated or malicious propaganda." ”
But it was this famous journalist who publicly claimed that there had never been a great famine in the Soviet Union, who inadvertently slipped his lips in 1934 while drinking with British embassy officials, saying that about 10 million people in the famine might have died of starvation.
This shows that Duranti knows the truth! He had been in the Soviet Union for a long time, and he knew better than anyone what was happening in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the Soviet Union as a whole. But he just kept his eyes open and talked nonsense, because he knew very well that if the Soviets thought that a journalist's report was not friendly enough, they would cancel his visa and let him get out. But if their coverage is positive enough, journalists can get extra perks, such as luxury homes and lifestyle specials...
Eugene Lyons, a left-wing correspondent for United Press, once described: "Mr. Duranti's life in the Soviet Union was pleasant and preferential. He lives in a spacious apartment specially provided for him, equipped with a private car, and enjoys a sumptuous meal every day in the company of a sexy waitress (she is the mistress of an old man in Moscow, and also serves as a secretary and a maid). This is something that Duranti could not have imagined while working in Western countries. ”
In this way, the two sides hit it off, Duranti was honored by the Soviet government as a guest of honor, and Duranti also used "authority" to deny the existence of famine, setting the tone for western media reporting.
06 The Price of Truth
Just as Duranti was receiving widespread acclaim and even enjoying the courtesy of the stars in the White House, the humble Jones was gradually forgotten. But it didn't end there, Jones was blacklisted from the Soviet Union, banned from entering the Soviet Union, and the mainstream news media no longer dared to hire him despite the severe protests of the Soviet Foreign Ministry.
In 1934, Jones traveled to the Far East to begin his journey of discovery of the truth about the world. After the events of September 18, he became acutely aware of Japan's ambitions for China and the entire Asian territory, and he aimed to write a book about the Japanese's intentions in the Far East.
Jones arrived in Guangzhou, China, in 1935 and interviewed Zhang Xueliang in Hankou, Hubei Province, on June 20 of the same year. After that, he went all the way north to Beijing, Mongolia and other places, and along the way he recorded many Chinese words expressing his determination to resist to the end.
What Joneswan did not expect was that death was approaching him step by step. In August 1935, he was kidnapped by bandits on Mongolia's border with Manchuria, who, while waiting for ransom, inexplicably shot him. This year, Jones was just 30 years old.
At that time, Mongolia and Manchuria belonged to the Soviet Union and Japan's sphere of influence, which is not surprising. As one later commentator put it: "The Soviets know what he found in Russia, and the Japanese know what he found in the Far East...
07 Conclusion
Compared with Jones's tragic life, the false Duranti actually lived to the age of 73. Through the two five-year plans, the Soviet Union established a complete industrial system, and the total industrial output value exceeded that of France, Germany, Britain and other powers, ranking first in Europe and second in the world.
It was also the foundation laid by the Soviet Union with the "scissor difference" and the policy of agricultural collectivization that the Soviet Union was able to defeat the invincible Nazi Germany in the ensuing Second World War, and quickly became a global superpower on a par with the United States after the war.
Time flies, Jones's efforts have not been in vain, and the truth of the Great Famine in Ukraine will eventually be revealed to the world. In the mid-1940s, some Ukrainian expatriates in exile in the United States and Canada first raised the issue of the famine that occurred in Ukraine in the early 1930s, and the West gradually paid attention to this event.
Especially in the late 1980s, with Gorbachev's campaign to expose "gaps in history", some archives related to the famine of 1932-1933 were gradually made public, and this event has become public.
In early 2002, the Ukrainian government declassified more than 1,000 secret documents about the famine. Ukrainian President Kuchma also signed a decree designating November 22 as a "famine remembrance day."
And in 2006, jones, who was the whistleblower of the Great Famine in Ukraine, his plaque was placed at the University of Wales in the United Kingdom. This plaque always warns everyone: lies are the most hateful, it is necessary to have courage to tell the truth, and let us always remember those who tell the truth!
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