Mr Jones and the genocide deniers
Mr Jones, a film about the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s and the Welsh journalist who exposed it, is well worth seeing. It is still playing in a few cinemas around London and will be released in America next month.
Don’t expect narrative brilliance. The scriptwriting is workmanlike rather than gripping. Some of the tension feels contrived: a subplot involving George Orwell makes no sense; as often happens in films, our hero survives impossibly sticky situations.
Where Mr Jones breaks new ground is not the way Polish director Agnieszka Holland tells the story, but the story she chooses to tell.
There have been many (great) movies about the Nazi Holocaust, but those about Stalin’s atrocities are rare.
It is astonishing, in particular, that few filmmakers have seen dramatic potential in the Ukrainian famine of 1932–3 — when up to 10 million people were starved to death or shot. The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore has called it “a tragedy unequalled in human history except by the Nazi and Maoist terrors”.
Mr Jones has the merit of venturing into this cinematically unfamiliar territory. It also stands out because its cast of villains includes the West’s “enlightened” media — normally a force for the good.
The world’s major newspapers failed abysmally over Ukraine. When Gareth Jones arrived in Moscow in 1933, he discovered that his colleagues did not want to look too closely into reports of a famine. He was the first to tell the story with factual and moral clarity, and under his own name.
Malcolm Muggeridge — who worked for The Manchester Guardian — was one of the few other correspondents who dared to speak the truth, but he did so in anonymous articles. In his memoirs written decades later, Muggeridge gave this scathing account of the Moscow press pack at the time:
“The Soviet press was the only source of news… So all I had to do was go through the papers, pick out any item that might be interesting to readers of the Guardian, dish it up in a suitable form…. The original item itself was almost certainly untrue or grotesquely distorted. One’s own deviations, therefore, seemed to matter little, only amounting to further falsifying what was already false.”
This was dispiriting work. To boost their morale, Muggeridge writes, the correspondents would outdo each other in testing the credulity of the intellectuals who flocked to Moscow to see Stalin’s wonders for themselves:
“Persuading church dignitaries to feel at home in an anti-God museum was too easy to count. So was taking lawyers into the people’s courts. I got an honourable mention by persuading Lord Marley that the queueing at food shops was permitted by the authorities because it provided a means of inducing the workers to take a rest when otherwise their zeal for completing the five-year plan in record time was such that they would keep at it all the time, but no marks for floating a story that Soviet citizens were being asked to send in human hair — any sort — for making of felt boots. It seemed that this had actually happened.”
Muggeridge does not feature in Mr Jones. But the film shows how the arrival of an earnest, and fearless, truth-seeker put a cat among the pigeons. The media elite of the day scrambled to minimise the impact of Jones’s stories.
The most striking character is The New York Times famous correspondent Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his glowing reports on the Soviet Union.
Duranty is played by a wonderfully sinister Peter Sarsgaard. When I saw the film, I felt he was too sleazy to be credible: the awful limping, the sexual perversion — and the British accent! — made him look like a cardboard Hollywood baddie.
But a quick internet search confirmed that it was all true. Duranty was a sexual predator (his defence of Stalin, it seems, was at least partly due to kompromat: the Kremlin knew about his orgies.) He had lost a leg. And yes, he was English.
Duranty did his best to discredit Jones’s accurate accounts, which he called a “big scare story”. There was no starvation in Ukraine, but just “widespread mortality from diseases from diseases due to malnutrition.”
He argued, like many intellectuals, that it was wrong to hold Russia to Western standards and that individual suffering was justified by the collective promise of a glorious future: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking the eggs.” (Duranty actually used the phrase.)
Duranty was a genocide denier and remains a byword for the worst kind of journalism. Yet — to my knowledge — such an obvious target for puncturing had not been portrayed in a film before. Incidentally, his Pulitzer Prize was never withdrawn.
