“On the train, a communist denied that there was hunger. I dumped a crust of bread from my personal supply into a spittoon. A peasant traveling in the same carriage went looking for it and devoured it voraciously. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant came back for it and devoured it. The communist is silent.
This cruel and sordid episode took place in the Ukraine in 1933 and was narrated by Gareth Jones, a Welshman who had been an adviser to MP (and former British Prime Minister) George Lloyd and who then made a living as a freelance journalist specializing in international affairs. politics and, in particular, in the USSR. Jones enjoyed several advantages over Western press correspondents in Moscow: he had a good command of the Russian language and, taking advantage of his influence in the political spheres, he had obtained a visa that gave him freedom of movement, while his colleagues not only had the strongly restricted by the Soviet authorities because they knew that if they wrote articles that were frankly unfavorable to the regime, they would be expelled from the country and lose their livelihood.
Jones was thus the only Western journalist to roam freely in the Ukraine in 1932-33 and one of the few to report on the horrors of the famine that swept the region, but, due to circumstances to be detailed later, he was branded a liar. and his revelations did not produce any reaction in the policy of Western countries towards the USSR. The suppression or downplaying of the Jones revelations was a minor episode when compared to the enormous effort undertaken by Stalin to erase one of the darkest moments in the history of the USSR, a radical rewriting of reality that not only extended to the collapse of the USSR, but in 1991, as it is carried out today, in Russia and in the West –Portugal included–, by the spiritual heirs of the Soviet regime.
Map of the famine in the USSR in 1933, the incidence being greater the darker the tone. The map was part of the pamphlet “Hunger in the USSR” (1933), by “A. Markoff”, i.e. Abraham Markoff, a prominent Russian-born American communist leader
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Source: Observadora
