At the forefront of Mr. Jones are two reporters. One, Gareth Jones (British television actor James Norton), an ambitious rookie freelancer for what was then called the Manchester Guardian, is so inexperienced he forgot to bring his typewriter on the trip. The other, Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard, Wormwood), The New York Times‘ Moscow bureau chief, is fresh off a Pulitzer prize for his fawning coverage of Stalin’s command-and-control economic policies.
Jones has been told Duranty is the man to see to arrange an interview with Stalin. He explains what he wants to ask: “So how are the Soviets suddenly on a spending spree? Who’s providing the finance?” Duranty is noncommittal about the interview, but does have an answer about where the money is coming from: agricultural exports. “Grain is Stalin’s gold.” He also offers some bad news — a German reporter who’s a friend of Jones and had promised to show him around Moscow has been murdered, apparently during a mugging — almost unknown in the stringently locked-down Moscow of the 1930s, particularly in the area where journalists and other necessary foreign evils lived.
Nosing around while he waits to see what will happen with his Stalin interview, Jones learns that his German friend thought something fishy was going on in the Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s breadbasket region, which had recently been placed off-limits to foreigners, and was planning to sneak in. Jones decides to do the same, arranging a tour of a German-built factory on the other side of the Ukraine from Moscow, then ditching his Soviet minder to spend a couple of days wandering alone on foot.
Even before he leaves the train, Jones has clues that something has gone deeply wrong. When he offers to buy an overcoat from a Ukrainian passenger, the man begs to be paid in bread rather than currency. When Jones pitches a gnawed apple core into a wastebasket, another man dives into the trash to retrieve it.
But nothing can prepare him for what he sees when he gets off: Stiffened corpses scattered around the train station. Corpses in empty, deserted farmhouses. Corpses stacked on carts moving along village streets. Corpses being chewed on by starving children, who afterward trill a mournful ballad: “Hunger and cold are in our house, nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep and our neighbor has lost his mind and eaten his children… .”
Jones is eventually picked up by Soviet security forces and returned to Moscow, where he’s warned never to tell anybody what he’s seen. The “or else” will be the life imprisonment of half-a-dozen British phone company engineers who’ve been arrested on trumped-up spying charges. As he prepares to leave, he’s ostracized by other reporters, including the sneering Duranty. “There comes a time in every man’s life when he must choose a cause greater than himself,” Duranty lectures him with, yes, moral clarity.
Back in London, Jones discovers Duranty has filed a New York Times story dismissing him as a credulous amateur. There may be a bit of hunger in the Ukraine, Duranty writes, but absolutely no famine. And anyway, what if there was? “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.”
[...]
The OGPU, as the KGB was called in the early 1930s, didn’t murder reporters who got off their leashes; it simply expelled them, forcing them to leave their posh Moscow habitat for the mean streets of the Depression back home. (The name of the murdered-reporter character, Paul Kleb, suggests he was intended as an homage to Russian-American journalist Paul Klebnikov, a Forbes staffer who was gunned down in Moscow in 2004).
Jones didn’t pull any James Bond razzmatazz to reach the Ukraine; he simply bought a ticket to Kharkov, a city much further down the line, and got off early. He wasn’t arrested and he wasn’t threatened; he finished his reporting trip and didn’t say anything about what he’d seen until he got back to London. None of this contradicts Mr. Jones’ central thesis — that the mainstream pack of foreign correspondents in Moscow in the 1930s were a pack of mewling Stalinist whores, and that the novice Jones was a better journalist and a braver man than any of them — but it’s an unnecessary distraction.
If anything, though, Mr. Jones’ depiction of the vicious way he was treated by his colleagues is understated. The first person to reveal the mainstream journalism cabal against Jones was Eugene Lyons, the Moscow correspondent for the United Press wire service at the time Jones was there. In his 1937 book Assignment in Utopia, Lyons recounts how after Jones began writing and giving speeches about the famine, all the foreign correspondents went to a meeting with the chief Soviet censor, who ordered them to denounce the young reporter as a liar.
Lyons admits that all the correspondents knew that Jones’ stories were absolutely accurate, even though none of them had reported the famine in their own newspapers, due to “the compelling need to remain on friendly terms with the censors.” (Some of them had even discussed the details of the famine with Jones before he went on his reporting trip.) Nonetheless, Lyons wrote, they all complied, “unanimously and in almost identical formulations of equivocation. … Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstaking garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials.” After the deal was done, they broke out the vodka and partied well into the night.
Lyons may have been hyping his report a bit (though it scarcely did him any credit, either as a reporter or a human being) but the deliberate slander of Jones and his stories has subsequently been investigated and verified by several historians (including S.J. Taylor in Stalin’s Apologist, her scathing biography of Duranty; Anne Applebaum in her history of Ukrainian starvation, Red Famine; and Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin).
And Duranty (who is played with a stunningly lustrous menace by Sarsgaard) was indeed the most bloodthirsty of the bunch. The line in his story about breaking eggs to make utopian socialist omelettes is dead accurate. And it apparently became a guide post for future generations of Times reporters. Herbert Matthews, whose mistaken or mendacious — take your pick — stories on Fidel Castro helped plunge Cuba into seven decades (and counting!) of miserable tyranny, would later blithely observe of Castro’s sanguinary appetite for executions, “A revolution is not a tea party.”
[...]
In recent years, the paper has been increasingly uneasy about its old reporter, even hiring a historian to evaluate his Soviet coverage. But when the historian suggested Duranty’s Pulitzer price be revoked, the Times turned self-righteous. “The notion of airbrushing history kind of gives me the creeps,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor at the time.
I thought of that last week when the Times editorialized in favor of pulling down Confederate statues.
