A memorial plaque to Gareth Jones, who told the world about the Holodomor, has been opened in Kyiv

A memorial plaque to Gareth Jones, a journalist who was one of the first to tell the world about the Holodomor, the Soviet man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians between 1932 and 1933, has been opened at the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv.

Gareth Jones was a Welsh journalist who was one of the first people to speak about Holodomor in the Soviet Ukraine. In 1931 he wrote an article in The Times, a British newspaper, anonymously, and later, in 1933, wrote an article under his own name to report on the severe starvation he had seen in Ukraine. His report was published, among others, in the Manchester Guardian and the New York Evening Post.

The bronze memorial plaque was installed in the reading hall of the Department of Foreign Ukrainian Studies. It was made in Liubov and Myroslav Trutyak’s art studio in Toronto at the initiative of Lyubomyr Lutsyuk, Canadian historian and geographer of Ukrainian origin.

“In memory of Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones, a graduate from the Aberystwyth University, Wales, the University of Cambridge, one of the first journalists to report on the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-193,” is transcribed on a plaque.

You can read about Gareth Jones, his experience and investigation in such books:

Eyewitness to the Holodomor
Tell Them We Are Starving (The 1933 Soviet Diaries of Gareth Jones).
Gareth Jones. The man who knew too much

There’s also a movie, “Mr. Jones” which is an historical thriller based on his life.

Gareth Jones was banned from the Soviet Union for revealing truth about Stalin’s regime.

Image: Wikipedia