I really enjoyed the movie Mr. Jones, which tells the incredible story of Gareth Jones, a young Welsh journalist who travelled to Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1933 to investigate the famine that Stalin inflicted on the people of Ukraine (which came to be known as the Holodomor). 

It is, in many ways, a contemporary story because, as Anne Applebaum discusses in the video above, this event was the 1930s version of “fake news”. Stalin denied there was a famine and most of the Moscow press corps didn’t report on it. Jones was one of the very few journalists who not only visited Ukraine at the height of the famine, but also had the courage to tell the truth about what happened there. There were several reasons why the story of what happened in Ukraine wasn’t being told. One was that, much like today, journalism in the 1930s was a rather insecure profession and journalists were socially dependent on the relationship with their editors. Reporting on the famine or doing any dangerous work in 1930s Moscow could result in you losing your job, getting kicked out of the country, or worse. Most Western journalists therefore didn’t want to ask the difficult questions, preferring to live in their bubble of comfort. Jones, being young, an outsider and rather idealistic (which probably eventually cost him his life), made their existence in Moscow go from being decadent and indulgent to uncomfortable. The film covers the tension and relationship between Jones and another journalist, Walter Duranty, who was then the NY Times correspondent in Moscow and had actually won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a series of mostly positive articles about Stalin and the Soviet Union. When Jones’ article initially came out, Duranty went out of his way to discredit him and cover up the truth (see Stalin’s Apologist for more on Duranty’s story).

Another reason the context and story of Jones is fascinating is because 1933 was, in retrospect, such a crossroads year for humanity. Hitler had just become the Chancellor of Germany (Jones actually wrote a series of prescient articles about him). Stalin had continued to consolidate power in the Soviet Union. As one of the panelists discusses, you basically had these two massive asteroids that had just hit the earth in Hitler and Stalin but humanity had yet to really catch up at that point in the story. Anyway, the movie and embedded panel discussion is worth a watch, at very least because the story of Jones deserves to be more widely known and appreciated.