The Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion

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home > Transactions > Volume 30 - 2024 > GARETH JONES, HERO OF UKRAINE; A HERO FOR WALES?

GARETH JONES, HERO OF UKRAINE; A HERO FOR WALES?

Gareth Jones is best known as a witness in 1933 to the Holodomor famine under Stalin that killed an estimated four million people in Ukraine and many more in the rest of the Soviet Union. But the significance of what Jones did still resonates, with a brutal physical war on the very territory where he revealed that people were starving, and a war for truth being fought with just as much passion and intensity as he had to deploy to get his story out.

To understand Jones’s contribution properly, we need to know his background and experiences before his defiance of Soviet authorities on an information-gathering exercise to Ukrainian villages – never forgetting that his short life ended on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, when he was murdered in China, possibly by Soviet agents.

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