The famine that hit the Soviet Union in 1931–33 was horrific and largely hidden from the world. Millions starved to death and others resorted to cannibalism to survive. Although ‘Mr Jones’, directed by Agnieszka Holland took some liberties with the facts for dramatic effect, much of what is revealed in the film does correspond to what Jones himself saw.
Although ‘Mr Jones’, directed by Agnieszka Holland took some liberties with the facts for dramatic effect, much of what is revealed in the film does correspond to what Jones himself saw.
In his original report, for example, Gareth Jones described how a communist he was travelling with tried to deny the famine: “I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it”.
Famine was, unfortunately, a regular feature of rural life for many centuries in this part of Europe. In 1921–22, a major famine struck Russia’s Volga region, which had been ravaged by the economic crisis before the First World War and then during the Civil War, before a serious drought set in. Then Lenin and the Bolsheviks cooperated with European and American humanitarian organisations in a highly public campaign to provide food relief.
What set the 1931–33 famine apart was that Stalin and the new Kremlin bureaucracy, aided by Western governments and a large section of the press, attempted to cover it up. Now information about this horrific event has been weaponized.
In its most crude form, the famine is blamed on the Bolshevik revolution. Inheritors of the Stalinist tradition play down its significance or deny it ever took place. Today’s Kremlin also follows this path, denying any responsibility for those events. Right-wing Ukrainian nationalists, describe the famine as ‘Holodomor”, a combination of Ukrainian words ‘hunger’ and ‘killing’, implying the famine was planned and intentional. Often it is simply described as ‘genocide’, organized by Stalin against the Ukrainian nation. But whatever the language is used, the horror of the famine has left a very deep felt sense of injustice amongst a large layer of the Ukrainian nation.
In this sense, ‘Mr Jones’ feeds the right-wing nationalist narrative by depicting the famine as intentionally directed at Ukraine. This is to a degree inevitable, because when Jones escaped the artificial and depraved ex-pat environment of Moscow’s Metropol hotel, he travelled to Ukraine. But in his original reports, he explicitly wrote “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, Central Asia”. Latest academic research suggests that 6–7 million died in this brutal famine, just over half of whom were in Ukraine. The rest were from Belarus, Russia’s far north and Kuban, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. This fact alone undermines the argument that the famine was directed specifically at Ukraine.
‘Mr Jones’ however, rightly claims that the famine was not just an accident of nature. It was man-made, maybe not intentionally but due to monstrous mistakes made by the Stalinist clique.
‘Mr Jones’ however, rightly claims that the famine was not just an accident of nature. It was man-made, maybe not intentionally but due to monstrous mistakes made by the Stalinist clique
They then went to extraordinary lengths to hide the consequences from the Russian and international audiences.
Jones, and his journalist colleague Malcolm Muggeridge, were not the first to reveal the news. Horrific information was already being distributed by the International Left Opposition (ILO). In 1932, for example, they reported that “Last year’s increase in the tax in kind introduced in Ukraine and other places — Siberia and the Urals — has created severe shortages and in places outright hunger, provoking the peasantry to take special measures of self-preservation, by hiding the harvest — collective farmers are in effect stealing bread from themselves”.
These reports, coming out of the Soviet Union stressed the increasing economic and social catastrophes, as well as the political repression. They were instrumental in increasing the urgency with which the Left opposition demanded a change in policies from Moscow.
The underlying theme in ‘Mr Jones’ that the famine was man-made, and largely due to forced grain requisitions meant it makes no attempt to investigate the real causes. It is so much easier to blame Stalin’s hatred of Ukraine, who was indeed a Great Russian chauvinist with a vindictive character, than to understand the root causes, which lay in a more deep-rooted process brought about by the delay in the development of the world revolution.
The Bolshevik revolution in 1917 established a worker’s state, and adopted some of the most progressive social, economic and democratic policies including workers’ control of production, land to the peasants, equal rights for women and the rights of nations to self-determination. The Bolsheviks expected that the Russian revolution would spread to the more developed countries. But this unfortunately did not occur.
After the destruction and harsh measures of the civil war, the New Economic Policy (NEP), intended to create a breathing space for international revolution to develop was implemented. Banks and key companies were maintained under state control, but concessions were made to capitalism. Factories ran on the basis of profit, while small enterprises were allowed to operate. Instead of requisitioning grain, peasants were asked to pay a tax, at first in kind and then, as they sold grain, in money.
The NEP was successful, it restored industry, agricultural output grew by 1928 to 40% above pre-war levels. But it also created a layer of rich ‘entrepreneurial’ Nepmen in the towns and rich peasant owners, Kulaks, in the country. At the same time, prices of industrial goods increased faster than those of agricultural products — causing, what Trotsky called, the “Scissors crisis”. The Kulaks stopped sending food to the cities, preferring to stockpile or speculate. In reality, elements of capitalism were gathering strength, which for a period drove a strengthening of the conservative, bureaucratic caste around Stalin.
Foreseeing these dangers, Trotsky and the Left Opposition argued for a conscious policy to strengthen the planning of industry and for the voluntary collectivisation of agriculture. Lenin had always had a careful approach to collectivisation, even arguing against pushing collectivisation in parts of Central Asia and the Caucasus because the peasantry was not prepared for it. By 1928 only about 1% of agricultural land had been collectivised. The Left opposition proposed freeing the poorer peasants from taxation, and providing cheap credit for the purchase of farming equipment to encourage voluntary collectivisation by example. In the ‘Platform of the Joint Opposition‘ they proposed a progressive tax on the Kulaks and measures to ensure that hired labour received proper wages and rights to defend themselves.
The Stalinist clique poured scorn on these proposals. They refused to accept that the Kulaks were causing problems and arguing it was too early to speed up industrialisation. Encouraging the Kulaks to “enrich yourselves”, they even considered de-nationalising the land — a major foundation of the Soviet economy.
Then reality hit home as the scissors opened too far. The Kulaks refused to send grain at the prices offered and major cities faced the threat of famine. Stalin’s response was that of a typical dictator — rather than amend grain prices as the Left opposition proposed, he panicked and executed a sharp 180 degree turn. The NEP was replaced by a five-year plan with an unreasonably rapid rate of growth. On 15th February 1928, the population suddenly read in Pravda that, contrary to what had earlier been said, the Kulaks had suddenly become too strong and were sabotaging the economy. Thus started forced collectivisation.
Kulaks, and very often any middle and poor peasants, who resisted collectivization were arrested and deported en-masse to other parts of the Soviet Union. In parallel, there was a dramatic increase in arrests of opposition supporters in Moscow and elsewhere. Peasants were expected to hand over their possessions to the collective farms. Many hid their stocks, destroyed their equipment and killed their horses and other livestock rather than do this.
No longer able to scrape a living off the land, many headed to the cities. As the correspondent from the East Ukrainian city of Kharkov wrote to the ILO: “At the stations of any significant towns and industrial centres, you get crowds of peasants who have fled their villages and collective farms because of the lack of products. Some are looking, in their words, for work; others don’t know what they want. One group of peasants told me that almost everyone had left their collective farm, because ‘the soldiers had carried everything away’”.
As if this was not bad enough, crude planning by the bureaucrats in Moscow set the food quotas expected from each collective farm far too high. They sent soldiers to collect the produce who, seizing both food and equipment to reach the quotas, left peasants with nothing left to eat or sow for the next year. The requisitions shown in ‘Mr Jones’ reflect this. They were, in part driven by Stalin’s determination to show the world the success of the five-year plan by exporting grain. Late in 1932, when the full scale of the catastrophe became clear, these quotas were eased off.
‘Mr Jones’ does succeed in highlighting another significant reason, why so little is known about the famine. During the Great Depression, with the five-year plan delivering significant achievements, a layer of cultural figures such as George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland and the 150 American intellectuals who linked “support for the Moscow verdicts with the cause of progressive democracy in the United States” became cheer-leaders for the Stalinist system.
But the blindness of these intellectuals is nothing compared to the greed and unprincipled character of the Western powers. ‘Mr Jones’ reveals the vested interests of the English government as six engineers from the Vickers company had been arrested on sabotage and spying charges. Jones himself reported: “The arrest of the British engineers in Moscow is a symbol of panic in consequence of conditions worse than in 1921. Millions are dying of hunger. The trial, beginning Saturday, of the British engineers is merely a pendant to the recent shooting of thirty-five prominent workers in agriculture, including the Vice-Commissar of the Ministry of Agriculture, and is an attempt to check the popular wrath at the famine which haunts every district of the Soviet Union’.
As in real life, Walter Durranty, Moscow Bureau Chief for the New York Times is depicted in ‘Mr Jones’ as cynical and depraved. A fervent opponent of the Bolshevik revolution, he found common ground with Stalin. Describing Jones’s claim of famine as “wishful thinking’ he wrote: “There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from disease due to malnutrition, especially in the Ukraine, North Caucasus, and Lower Volga.” For this and other articles praising Stalin’s economic policies, Durranty won the Pullitzer prize, an award which was never rescinded. Little intricacies such as mass repression and famine were not to get in the way of US diplomatic and commercial interests, which Durranty was promoting.
Before 1917, Ukraine was at the centre of inter-imperialist conflicts. By the 1930s, it had gained statehood as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic within the USSR and initially experienced significant growth. But the famine created incredible mistrust with Moscow, which pushed a layer of right-wing nationalists into a pro-Nazi position and left a long-lasting bitterness. As Trotsky commented: “but for the rape of Soviet Ukraine by the Stalinist bureaucracy there would be no Hitlerite Ukrainian policy”. His demand at that time for the establishment of “A united, free and independent workers’ and peasants’ Soviet Ukraine’ offered the only genuine way out.
‘Mr Jones’ is well worth watching, but its value is dramatically increased if the works of Trotsky including “Revolution betrayed” and “Problems of the Ukraine” are read as background.
