Stalin’s man-made famine in 1930s Soviet Ukraine ranks as one of the worst crimes of the totalitarian twentieth century. Millions died in the famine, which was orchestrated by Moscow in order to crush Ukraine’s independence movement and break rural resistance to the collectivization of agriculture in what was then the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. The scale of the atrocity is hard to fathom, with many of Eastern Europe’s most fertile regions transformed into apocalyptic wastelands and countless villages depopulated. However, unlike the far more notorious horrors of the Nazi regime, Stalin’s greatest crime remains relatively unknown.
It is a crime that in many ways foreshadowed today’s world of weaponized information and hybrid warfare. The deliberate starvation of the Ukrainian nation was only possible due to blanket Soviet censorship and the collaboration of a Western press corps in Moscow who enabled the crime in order to protect their own accreditation and maintain access to the Soviet elite. As the shadow of death spread across rural Ukraine, international correspondents in Moscow lined up to denounce isolated reports of famine as “fake news”.
One of the few to break through this wall of silence was intrepid young Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who visited Soviet Ukraine during the famine. His eyewitness accounts alerted the outside world to the unfolding catastrophe and led to his denouncement by his journalistic colleagues.
