Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones - Welsh journalist who exposed Soviet famine of 1932–33.

The Soviet famine of 1932–33 killed millions of people in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union. Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, the Volga Region, Kazakhstan, the South Urals, and West Siberia were included in the areas heavily impacted by the famine. In the Ukraine it is known as the Holodomor and it has been estimated that over 3 million died, with some suggesting the deaths could stand at over 7 milion. In Kazakhstan it is thought over 600,000 (15% of all Kazakhs) died. The famine of 1932–1933 has been seen as genocide by Joseph Stalin's government with a ruthless policy of forced collectivisation of agriculture being pursued. Stalin governed the Soviet Union as its dictator from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953.

Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones (13 August 1905 – 12 August 1935) was the Welsh journalist who first publicised in the Western world the existence of the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 and helped expose Stalin’s genocide. After he visited the Soviet Union in the early 1930's and eluded authorities by entering Ukraine, he witnessed at first hand the man-made starvation and wrote of his experiences. At the time many continued to express uncritical sympathy with the Soviet regime and his reports of wide scale starvation were widely attacked. He reported:

"I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, 'There is no bread. We are dying'. This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening."

Gareth Jones died on the eve of his 30th birthday. He was on a fact-finding tour of China in 1935 when he was captured and murdered by bandits under mysterious circumstances. There were strong suspicions that his murder was engineered by the NKVD (Soviet secret police organisation from 1934 to 1946) in revenge for his exposure of the Soviet famine.

Image above: Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones.

Image below: Awful images of starvation during the Holodomor.