Travel to Ukraine was forbidden, but that didn’t prevent Jones from eluding Soviet authorities and making his way there anyway. What he saw and heard horrified him. Back in Berlin, he reported to the world,

I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, “There is no bread. We are dying.”

Jones had walked into one of Soviet communism’s most heinous crimes: the Holodomor of 1932-33. Known also as the Terror-Famine and the Ukrainian Genocide, it was an intentional, man-made, planned-from-the-top catastrophe that claimed the lives of between four and ten million people. It was engineered by Joseph Stalin to crush Ukrainian resistance to forced collectivization of agriculture. …

Two years after his Ukraine adventures, Gareth Jones and a German journalist covered events in turbulent China. They were captured by bandits who released the German within two days but held on to Jones for sixteen more. Then on August 12, 1935—the day before his 30th birthday—Jones was shot to death. The evidence tying the murder to the Soviet secret police was overwhelming.

[Jones never did get his due. The film “Mr. Jones” did its best to restore his rightful place, and to put Walter Duranty into his. My film review can be found here. — Ed]