Stalin’s Man at the New York Times. A film explores the monstrous Soviet horror and the cover-up by a Pulitzer winner. He pushed Stalin's propaganda and lied to hide the truth about Soviet atrocities.
Wall Street Journal: The words ‘must see’ are grotesquely overused in movie reviews, but in this case, they are apt,” writes Francis Maier. He’s talking about the remarkable film, “Mr. Jones,” currently available on Amazon and other platforms.
It is a story of Soviet communist horror and the New York Times writer who enabled it.
What matters in “Mr. Jones” is the Holodomor, the famine that befell Ukraine in the years 1932-33. Current scholarship estimates that just under four million people died. They did not pass away from natural causes.
The best and the most detailed English-language study of the subject is “Red Famine,” a 2017 book by Anne Applebaum, who demonstrates that starvation was a deliberate policy, enforced by Stalin through the requisition of crops and other products and the widespread persecution, deportation, or even execution of the non-compliant.
His grand scheme of collectivized farming had failed, as any local farmer could have predicted, yet it was not ideologically allowed to fail. Who better than the Ukrainians, so often distrusted and demonized by Moscow, to be cast as scapegoats and saboteurs?" ...
The film’s title character is the real-life Gareth Jones, a young Welsh journalist in the 1930s who risked everything to tell the truth about communist mass murder.
"It was Walter Duranty who, in brushing off Jones’s account of the atrocities, blithely explained to Times readers, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs”—one of the most shameful phrases in the history of the newspaper.
The eggs were human beings. This determination not to know, or to look away when the facts admonish our beliefs, is among our most durable frailties, and Duranty was but the first of many skeptics.
As late as 1988, an article in the Village Voice, reviling “one-note faminologists” and accusing them of falsehood, bore the subtitle “A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right,” as if the urge to verify hardship and grief were no more than a Reaganite affectation.
Twenty years later, Dimitry Medvedev, Russia’s President at the time, referred to the “so-called Holodomor.” Any discussion of Ukraine’s being intentionally victimized, he added, would be “cynical and immoral.”
Jami Ganz interviews filmmaker Agnieszka Holland in the New York Daily News:
“I was thinking for quite a long time, since the end of the Iron Curtain, that very quickly we forgot and forgive the communist crimes. And some crimes against humanity are unbearable,” the Oscar nominee, 71, told the Daily News.
Noting that much of the world “is not really familiar” with the film’s events, Holland added that even the true death toll is unknown.
“No one speaks about it. No one knows about it,” she said. “So I thought that somehow it is a duty to put a light on that.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/stalins-man-at-the-new-york-times-11595867217?fbclid=IwAR21Q8fAILi0geetQn0ejrvjB4ELO6F0xRwq9fIQKNVeP898bLBo_t2hM4M
