The Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center hosted the “Mr. Jones: Unmasking the Cult of Stalin” webinar on June 22 to review the film Mr. Jones. Anne Applebaum, historian and author of Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, moderated the discussion with scriptwriter Andrea Chalupa and director of the film, Agnieszka Holland.
Mr. Jones takes place in 1930s Soviet Ukraine and documents the plight of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones in his mission to uncover the horrors of Holodomor.
At the time of Jones’ arrival, the famine was well under way and had already killed millions of people. Joseph Stalin’s denial of the famine permeated to the Moscow press core, and few journalists were reporting the events accurately. The world was oblivious to Stalin’s genocide.
The film follows Jones’ journey and recreates the atrocities of Holodomor.
For Chalupa, her inspiration behind the film came from her roots in eastern Ukraine. Her grandfather, who was from Donbas, wrote out his life story before his death and described what he had endured during Holodomor. In college, she set out to study how Stalin had gotten away with what he did.
Chalupa describes Jones as an outsider who “came into town and blew the lid off this thing”. She said that he disrupted the very existence of the political party leaders and journalists that helped cover up the famine.
The Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center hosted the “Mr. Jones: Unmasking the Cult of Stalin” webinar on June 22 to review the film Mr. Jones.
Applebaum explained that Jones had made his way into Ukraine by getting an invitation to see a factory in Kharkiv. On his train from Moscow to Kharkiv, he got off halfway, near the Ukrainian border, and started walking through the villages. This was in March of 1933, at the height of the famine. “In a way, the emotional height of the film is when Jones gets off the train and enters Ukraine, and there is a very striking series of scenes that take place in starving Ukraine,” said Applebaum.
Those gruesome scenes are a necessary part of telling the story of Holodomor.
For director Agnieszka Holland, who is known for three Oscar-nominated films about the Holocaust, the initial reaction to working on another tragedy was simply that “she cannot tell it anymore.”
However, the lack of global recognition about Holodomor drove Holland to say yes to the script. “There is something incredibly unjust in the fact that Stalin’s crimes and communist crimes didn’t enter the global conscience,” she said. “In human memory, Communists’ crimes vanished somehow.”
Mr. Jones serves as a warning.
“I find it very unjust and also dangerous: unjust because those victims remain nameless and voiceless and dangerous because it means that we cannot learn the lesson that always comes from those dark moments of history,” said Holland.
Holland mentioned the importance of making the film with an artistic quality that reflected the horrors of Holodomor. She said that dying of hunger means “silence, loneliness, emptiness. You don’t see blood, you don’t hear cries or shouts. It’s very silent and distant somehow.”
Because of this, she decided to create the film “in a very minimalistic way”. The colors of the film were scaled down closer to black and white, speaking to the bleakness of famine.
In addition to telling the story of Gareth Jones, the film also touches on the actions of Walter Duranty, who was the New York Times correspondent in Moscow at the time. “One of the most fascinating stories of that era is the kind of tension and competition between the two of them,” said Applebaum.
While Jones was the truthteller, wanting to expose the Soviet Union’s murder of millions of Ukrainians, Duranty was complacent in the cover-up. Applebaum described that “very carefully and systematically Duranty went out of his way not to tell the story of the famine, and even when Jones’ material actually came out, he went over backward to dismiss it. ”
Why Duranty went against the ethics of his profession is a significant storyline in the film.
“I think ultimately he wanted to be a celebrity,” said Chalupa. She explained that Duranty’s actions were a “classic story of access journalism” and of “journalists not doing their duty because they were more enamored with their proximity to power.”
The Pulitzer committee decided not to revoke Duranty’s prize.
Jones was killed in China when he was 30, three years after traveling to Ukraine. When asked about Jones’ motivation behind his bravery, Chalupa said: “Gareth was a good soul, it’s just that simple.”
Parallels to George Orwell’s Animal Farm are also present in the script. Chalupa said that the immense censorship and inability to disagree was directly reflective of Orwell’s idea of the “thought police.” Orwell published Animal Farm about a decade after Jones made his trip to Ukraine. He named one of the main characters Farmer Jones, perhaps symbolically after the journalist.
Russian film critics did not respond well to the film. Holland said that they called the story a lie and claimed that the famine was not planned by Stalin. Mr. Jones was not bought for Russian distribution.
When Holland showed the film at an Israeli film festival, where a significant portion of the audience were Russain Jews who immigrated from the USSR, the story of Holodomor came as a shock. She used that moment as an example of the power of Russian propaganda.
Holland described this structural denial as “layers of lies.”
In Ukraine, however, the reception was “very emotional”, according to Holland. When something so traumatic has been unspoken and hidden for so long, the power of the film can serve as a release. Chalupa characterized this as “giving dignity back to the victims.”
Precisely for this reason, Holland pursued this project.
She described that film is a powerful tool to “wake up humans’ emotions” and saw it as “a duty to tell those stories.”
Chalupa echoed that sentiment. “Ultimately, I made the film for accountability, to give some justice to this story, and also hold it up as a warning,” said Chalupa, “especially [for] people in positions of power.”
Beyond the discussion of the film, the panelists also discussed the genocide more broadly, and why the West failed to fully understand and accept the evil of the Soviet regime.
“I think it’s always been a problem for the West to accept that we defeated Hitler, which was our great victory over evil,… [but] we did that in alliance with another evil system,” Applebaum said. This is because “it somehow undermines our own achievement.”
“This was not a famine that was caused by drought, it wasn’t caused by some accident of nature, it had been caused deliberately by Stalin,” emphasized Applebaum.
However, the effect of Holodomor does not lay in the distant past. Chalupa called for change in the present. “A nation that knows its past protects its future,” she said.
“Russia and the US are both hurting themselves by not adequately confronting and healing from their dark chapter of history. I think the only way forward is to bring these stories to light.”
The very existence of Holodomor as genocide is still denied by many, including the Russian government. Ukrainians are still fighting for recognition, accountability, and apologies.
