“My Dearest Englishman, I can imagine you now, playing a game of golf that you love so much…”
He imagined her writing it, Lyushkov staring at her insolently, the man with the cosh waiting in the shadows. When she had finished, he heard Lyushkov’s rumble:
“Next letter…”
Author’s Note
Gareth Jones was shot dead in 1935. He was killed in China at the orders of the Soviet secret police – payback for his efforts to tell the truth about the famine. That is the firm belief of his family and mine too.
This book is, of course, a work of fiction. But Stalin’s famine, the millions who died in Ukraine and Russia and the lies western journalists like Walter Duranty and useful idiots like George Bernard Shaw told about it were all too real. They faked the news in 1933.
Evgenia is fiction but Stalino, now Donetsk, was founded by Welsh mining engineer John Hughes and her story, or something like it, is not impossible.
Gareth Jones’ mother had taught the children of John Hughes. Jones did his best to counter the lies told by Duranty and the other Kremlin conformists but to little avail. Not enough people believed him and Duranty’s version of events, that there was no famine, prevailed. Lyushkov was real, too. He had been a GPU officer during the famine and, suspecting that he was about to be purged, he defected to Japan. There, he told the truth about the famine and the atrocities committed by the GPU. At the end of the second world war, he vanished.
Duranty won the Pulitzer and died in 1957 in Orlando, Florida. The New York Times still boasts about his Pulitzer to its continuing disgrace.
Big Bill Haywood and Fred Beal both ended up in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Though Haywood died there, Beal managed to get out and tell the truth about the famine in a book. Again, as with Jones, his story was so incredible it was not believed.
As a cub reporter for the Sheffield Telegraph in 1983, I met Malcolm Muggeridge who had written the truth about Stalin’s famine for the Manchester Guardian in 1933. Muggeridge wrote that the famine was “One of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe it ever happened.” Muggeridge wasn’t shot but he got the sack. His words hold true even today, especially in Vladimir Putin’s Russia where ignorance of Stalin’s evil is encouraged by the master of the Kremlin. Putin is, after all, a Chekist through and through.
The Max Borodin in my novel is my tribute to a real Russian journalist. Borodin, 1986-2018, was a brilliant journalist based in Yekaterinburg who broke the story of how Russian Wagner mercenaries were killed by American forces in Syria. A few days later he called a friend to say men with balaclavas were outside his flat. He fell out of his fifth-floor window by accident.
Or so the Russian authorities say.
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Copyright © John Sweeney, 2020
First edition published by Silvertail Books in 2020
The right of John Sweeney to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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Cover: Ollie Ray