Mr. Jones: The story of a journalist who told the world about the Holodomor and interviewed Stalin - ForumDaily
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Mr. Jones: the story of a journalist who told the world about the Holodomor and interviewed Stalin

The new film by the famous Polish director Agnieszka Holland, Mister Jones, tells the fascinating story of a British journalist’s struggle for the truth about the Holodomor. Writes about this with the BBC.

The film and his hero

In early March 1933, the 27-year-old British journalist Gareth Jones went to the USSR to interview Stalin.

Despite his youth, Jones had already had a decent political and journalistic career. In 1930, a Cambridge graduate with a degree in German, French and Russian entered the work as a foreign policy adviser to former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

Then he began working as a correspondent and in February 1933 got a sensation, becoming the first foreign journalist who managed to interview the new German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

He spoke with the future Fuhrer on board the fastest and most powerful Richtofen aircraft in Germany, on board which Hitler and Goebbels flew from Berlin to Frankfurt.

In his report, Jones wrote that if Richtofen had crashed then, the history of Europe would have gone a different way.

Immediately after Germany, Jones went to Moscow. In addition to journalistic interest in the economic successes of the USSR, he was drawn there by family history.

Before the revolution, Jones's mother worked as a governess in the family of the Welsh industrialist John Hughes. It was Hughes who founded the city, named in his honor Yuzovka.

In the 30 years it was known as Stalin, and since the 1961 year it bears the name Donetsk. The stories of his mother were firmly entrenched in the mind of Gareth, and he really wanted to visit those places.

In Moscow, Jones falls into the circle of the American journalist Walter Duranti, a correspondent for the New York Times, who was awarded a year earlier for his report on the Pulitzer Prize, which was very complimentary to the Stalin regime.

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The luxurious, even depraved - with gastronomic and sexual excesses - lifestyle of Duranty and his circle unpleasantly strikes Jones. He is even more struck by the American’s apparent desire to dissuade his British colleague from attempting to investigate rumors spreading in Moscow about a famine in Ukraine.

Using a slightly falsified letter from his former boss Lloyd George, Jones still seeks permission to go to Ukraine.

Having escaped from the culinary abundance of the government carriage and from the attendant assigned to it, the Briton immediately plunges into cruel reality.

The orange, which he chews in a common carriage, becomes an object of greedy glances, and a hungry crowd pounces on the orange peels thrown out by him.

On the streets are the corpses of people who died of starvation, and the bags of grain are taken away by the ruthless surplus-appraisal, looking hopeless in their despair, the hungry people.

Blood freezes from the scene in which, while wandering through the deserted, abandoned villages, Jones finds himself in the house where the children live. With weakened voices, they sing a song praising Stalin, and then they invite the guest to the table.

“Where does the food come from?” the journalist asks, devouring the stew offered to him. “From Kolya,” the older girl answers in an indifferent voice. Jones looks out into the yard and sees the body of a dead boy lying in the snow with his leg cut off. He instantly vomits.

Returning to Britain at the end of March 1933, Jones publishes a press release reprinted by the Manchester Guardian and New York Evening Post.

“I walked through the villages of twelve collective farms. Everywhere I heard a cry: “There is no bread! We are dying! This cry spreads throughout Russia - the Volga region, Siberia, Belarus, the North Caucasus, Central Asia.

I went to the Black Earth region, because once it was the richest granary of Russia and because journalists were not allowed there.

On the train, I threw a crust of bread into an urn. The peasant immediately pulled it out and eagerly ate it. I spent the night in a village where until recently there were two hundred cows, and now six are left. People eat livestock feed, and they are already running out of livestock.

Many died of hunger. “We are waiting for death,” they say. “But for now we still have feed for the livestock.” Head further south. The people there had nothing left. Many houses are empty, all the people are dead.”

The Kremlin’s response was instant. In a personal letter, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov informed Lloyd George that Gareth Jones was forever banned from entering the Soviet Union.

Despite the ban, Jones did not leave the topic of the USSR. He actively criticized the Stalinist regime and accused the leader of involvement in the killing of Kirov.

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In August 1935, while traveling through Inner Mongolia, Jones and his companion, a German journalist, were captured by local bandits.

The colleague was released two days later, and Jones was shot. “Mr Jones knew too much,” Lloyd George sadly wrote in his obituary for the death of his former employee.

But the widely spread version that his death became the revenge of the NKVD did not find documentary evidence.

Walter Duranty - a “useful idiot” or a servant of the Stalinist regime

Key in the history of Gareth Jones himself and in the new film about him appears the personality of Walter Durante.

It was he, a well-known and authoritative figure in the Western world, who was chosen by the Kremlin as a mouthpiece to refute Jones’s claims about the famine in Ukraine.

Literally a few days after the critical speech of the Manchester Guardian and New York Evening Post newspapers, the American New York Times published his article “Russians are starving, but they are not dying of hunger,” in which Duranty harshly criticizes Jones.

Some time later, in the same newspaper, he admits that “food shortages” affected many grain-growing regions of the country - Ukraine, Kuban and the Volga region. However, he insists, any reports of famine in the USSR are either exaggerations or malicious propaganda.

The reasons for Duranti’s frank collaboration with the Stalinist regime are still not fully clarified.

Yes, in the 1920-30-ies among Western intellectuals there were many people with left-wing beliefs who sincerely sympathized with the grandiose social experiment conducted by the USSR.

They perceived any criticism of the USSR as bourgeois propaganda. Lenin also cynically called them “useful idiots.”

However, Duranti, neither in history nor in the film, does not look like a great-hearted idealist.

There are various theories to explain his behavior - from cynical corruption to the Stalinist regime to fear of blackmail that threatened to expose his then-convicted homosexual relationships.

Stalin highly regarded his work, saying that Duranty was trying to "tell the truth" about the Soviet Union.

However, as Agnieszka Holland shows in his film, the compromising position was not occupied only by left-wing intellectuals.

Former Jones chef Lloyd George and his immediate circle are condescending, if not suspicious, to the revealing zeal of the young journalist.

There is a direct hint in the film: almost immediately after the duel unfolding in the press between Jones and Duranti, the United States finally recognized the USSR, and an active and very beneficial trade for the American business began, which could only prevent the accusations against Moscow.

Duranty himself died in 1957. In a sharply critical book about him, “Stalin’s Apologist,” published in 1990, its author Sally Taylor writes that the journalist’s reports, filtered through rose-colored glasses, played a significant role in President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to recognize the USSR.

In response to Taylor’s book, the New York Times published an editorial condemning Durante in which its reports were described as the worst in the history of the newspaper.

A campaign has begun for the deprivation of his posthumous Pulitzer Prize. The professor of Russian history at Columbia University, hired by the newspaper to comprehensively study Duranty's work, Mark von Hagen came to the conclusion that his reports were unbalanced, uncritical and often served as the mouthpiece of Stalinist propaganda, and that it would be better for the New York Times if the Pulitzer Prize awarded to him were withdrawn.

After a lengthy examination, stretched over several years, the Pulitzer Committee refused to deprive Duranti of the prize, not finding in his texts obvious and convincing evidence of intentional fraud.

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For the author of the film, Agnieszka Holland, the moral accents in the confrontation between Jones and Duranti are completely obvious.

Agnieszka Holland trajectory

Agnieszka Holland was born in Warsaw in 1948 in a mixed Polish-Jewish family. Her father, an officer in the Polish army and an activist in the Communist Party, lost his parents in the Holocaust and rejected his Jewish origin all his life.

Mother took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, helped Jews hide from the Nazis, for which she was awarded the honorary title “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel.

In the mid-60s, fascinated by the work of directors of the “new Czech wave” (Miloš Forman, Vera Chytilová), Agnieszka went to study cinema in Prague, where in 1968, after the defeat of the Prague Spring and the invasion of Soviet troops, she was arrested for participating in the dissident movement and spent several months in prison.

Holland began her journey into cinema under the wing of older generation Polish classics Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda. In 1976, she was Wajda's assistant on his Man of Marble, an openly dissident film considered an artistic precursor to Solidarity.

Having made several independent films in Poland at the turn of the 70s and 80s, in 1981, on the eve of the introduction of martial law after the defeat of Solidarity, Holland emigrated to France.

Much of her subsequent work is a result of her complex Polish-Jewish identity and an exploration of the conflicting relationships between Poles and Jews during World War II.

It is this theme that is the subject of her most famous films, Europe, Europe (1991) and Into the Dark (2011), both nominated for Oscars for best foreign language film.

The Holocaust and Stalinism are closely related topics for Agnieszka Holland.

“For a long time I wanted to talk about the crimes of the communist regime. While the Holocaust has become a universally accepted part of world history, many in Russia and the former USSR remain reluctant to talk about the crimes committed in the name of communism. I heard that in a recent poll in Russia, Stalin was voted the greatest Russian leader in history. Imagine the Germans choosing Hitler as their greatest leader!” - this is how she explains her decision to make a film about the fate and revelations of Gareth Jones.

But, according to Agnieszka Holland, the problems of the film are by no means limited to the history and our attitude to it. The struggle of Gareth Jones for the truth, although it happened eight and a half decades ago, sharply echoes the director with the pressing issues of our time.

“Even as we began working on the film, we knew we were telling a universal, timeless story. But only over time I realized how relevant it is today, in the era of fake news, alternative reality, corruption in the media, cowardice of politicians and indifference of people. How to tell the world the truth if the world doesn't want to hear it? This is a situation we face almost every day today. Because silence is a poison that poisons people’s souls.”

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“The clash of Jones's courage and determination with Duranty's cynical opportunism and cowardice remains as relevant as ever. Today we have no shortage of corrupt conformists and egoists, but there is an acute shortage of heroes like Jones and Orwell. That’s why we decided to return to these people again,” says the director.

George Orwell

George Orwell, tapping out the text of “Animal Farm” on a typewriter and reading fragments from the famous tale-pamphlet, his voice-over as a counterpoint, frames the film and runs through its entire fabric.

We even see a short, almost fleeting meeting between a writer and a journalist. This meeting is the conjecture of the scriptwriter Andrei Khalupa (the debut film work of an American journalist with Ukrainian roots). Jones and Orwell did not actually meet.

However, there is more than enough evidence of Orwell’s close acquaintance with the history of the struggle of Gareth Jones, including in the text of Animal Farm. Judge for yourself:

“In January it became clear that food supplies were running out. Grain portions were sharply reduced. It was announced that the potato supply rate would increase. Then it turned out that most of the potatoes were frozen in bunches that were poorly covered. The potatoes softened and flowed; they were practically no longer suitable for food. Only straw and beets remained. Hunger stared them right in the face.

It was vital to hide this fact from the rest of the world. […] People started using new lies about the cattle farm. Rumors began to spread again that all the animals were dying of hunger and disease, and that cannibalism and the killing of children were rampant on the farm. Napoleon was seriously concerned about the consequences that might ensue if the true state of affairs became known, and he decided to use Mr. Whymper to refute the rumors."

It is well known that Napoleon in Orwell’s book is Stalin. But the one who deliberately hides the truth from the world and embellishes the cruel reality of the Whymper farm is clearly none other than Walter Duranty.

Many Orwell researchers are convinced that the name of the farm-overthrown farm owner Mr. Jones was named after the journalist Gareth Jones.

James Norton and others

From the point of view of historical truth, the appearance in the film of the figure and text of George Orwell is justified and adds an additional intrigue to the already tense historical context of the picture. Dramatically, however, the entire line with Orwell is poorly spelled out in the script, it clearly sags and looks somewhat artificial.

Even more artificial seems to be the intrusion into the fabric of the narrative of a romantic line - Jones's sudden love for a fictional American journalist tied up in fictitious intrigues.

Such a plot move seems to be nothing more than a concession to the inevitable and indisputable Hollywood canons, according to which a successful movie supposedly cannot exist without a love story.

It would seem that the experience and reputation of Agnieszka Holland should have been enough to withstand the cliches, but, alas, it was not enough.

In some scenes, the director, following the scenario basis, is either overly scandalized (in the Moscow episodes), or overly melodramatic (in the Ukrainian), admits unfortunate failures of style and taste.

Failures are all the more annoying because the story itself and the brilliant acting couple James Norton (Gareth Jones) and Peter Sarsgaard (Walter Duranti) add such tension to the main plot intrigue of the picture that there was no need for deliberate, pedalized dramatization.

For James Norton, Gareth Jones is the third major role in a row, one way or another connected with Russian historical, literary, or even just detective stories.

First there was the irresistibly luxurious Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in the television adaptation of War and Peace. Then there was Alex Godman, the protagonist of the series about Russian crime in Britain, McMafia. And now - "Mr. Jones".

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Until recently, a little-known actor has turned into one of the main stars of British cinema today. Up to what is considered one of the main contenders for the replacement of Daniel Craig in the role of James Bond.

The role of Gareth Jones in a film shot outside the Hollywood system and a hard-to-understand picture is unlikely to bring the actor Oscar laurels. However, for the actor, it is very important.

“Gareth was a man with a huge soul, all his life he knew what he wanted to achieve, and for his desire for truth he sacrificed his life. In the current climate of confusion and fear, we can learn from him the courage to fight for the truth and be sure to share it with the world,” says James Norton.

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