13 August is the 120th anniversary of journalist Gareth Jones

On 13 August 1905, Gareth Jones was born in Wales, a journalist who was the first in the Western press to spread the truth about the Holodomor in Ukraine. On 29 March 1933, Jones called a press conference in Berlin, where he first publicly reported on the Holodomor.

In 1933, Jones travelled to the Soviet Union and, despite the ban, cleverly left Moscow for the villages of Ukraine and Kuban to see the situation firsthand. He travelled on foot and by train, talked to peasants, saw devastated houses and people swollen from hunger, and witnessed deaths.

After that, he directly called the events a famine created by the Soviet authorities. However, his reports contradicted the official line of the Kremlin and Soviet propagandists. Jones’ most well-known opponent was Walter Duranty of The New York Times, who wrote that there was no famine or that it was “exaggerated.”

As a result, Jones was banned from entering the USSR, and in 1935, during a trip to Inner Mongolia, he was abducted and killed under mysterious circumstances. That happened on 15 August, just two days after the journalist’s 30th birthday. Researchers believe that it was a revenge by the Soviet repressive authorities for having told the truth.

Gareth Jones, who was not afraid to stand up for the truth, became a symbol of journalistic integrity and courage, and his name became known to the general public thanks to Agnieszka Holland’s film Mr Jones.

You can learn more about Gareth Jones in James Mace’s article titled “A Tale of Two Journalists” and in the work of Roman Moldavskyi, a research associate at the Holodomor Museum, named “Spokesmen for the Truth about the Holodomor: Gareth Jones.”

As a reminder, since 2023, one of the streets in Kyiv has been named after Gareth Jones.