The
first night of the 2019 Cambridge Ukrainian Film Festival was moved from its
usual home in Trinity to the Old Divinity School, St John’s College. The reason for the bigger venue was the
extremely large audience for the Friday night film which we were seeing in
advance of its UK national release: Mr.
Jones (2019). This was a break with
the tradition of selecting low-budget Ukrainian output, in favour of a
British/Polish/Ukrainian co-production directed by the Polish Agnieszka Holland
and with a multi-national cast. The event
was held in conjunction with Cambridge Polish Studies, the Association of
Ukrainians in Great Britain, and the Holodomor Research and Educational
Consortium.
Before
we saw the main feature we had an introduction from Dr Olenka Pevny, director
of Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, and a prize-giving for the winning entry in the
annual competition, now in its second year, run by the Association of
Ukrainians in Great Britain for the best essay by a school student on the
Holodomor. We also watched a
fifteen-minute video, Holodomor: Stalin’s
Secret Genocide (directed by Andrea
Chalupa, 2016). Mr. Jones was followed by a reception, and a display of
publications on the Holodomor drawn from the Ukrainian collection at Cambridge
University Library.
As for Mr. Jones
itself, James Norton does a tremendous job bringing together the professional determination,
the far-sighted understanding of European politics, but the personal
vulnerability too, of Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist who highlighted the
genocide the Soviet government was inflicting on the Ukrainian people in
1932-3. Fresh from interviewing the new
German Chancellor, Hitler, and out of a job working as Lloyd George’s foreign
affairs advisor because of budget cuts, Jones goes to Moscow hoping to
interview Stalin.
He wonders how the country is managing to undertake a
spending spree when it is apparently broke; as he notes when asking questions
but finding himself stonewalled, ‘the numbers don’t add up.’ On arrival he learns that fellow journalist
Paul Kleb has been murdered in a ‘robbery’ after uncovering evidence of famine
in Ukraine. Despite foreign correspondents
being largely confined to Moscow and kept under tight surveillance, Jones
manages to wangle a trip to Ukraine, where his mother had once taught in what
is now Donetsk.
He slips his handler and, trudging through the snowy
landscape, sees for himself the desperate conditions the people are having to
endure. Grain – Stalin’s gold – is being
shipped to Moscow while people are literally dying in the streets. This is no natural disaster but an engineered
holocaust of enormous proportions. In a
terrible scene, himself starving and reduced to eating bark, he finds himself
with a group of siblings who give him soup with pieces of meat. When he asks how they have meat, the eldest
answers ‘Kolya’. Jones naively asks if
Kolya is a hunter, and they stare at him.
He finds what is left of Kolya in the snow outside. Walking along a road he sees a dead woman and
her crying infant. Corpse collectors callously
throw both onto the sleigh carrying a pile of bodies.
Captured at a railhead, he is returned to Moscow and
offered a choice. A group of British
engineers had been arrested on spying and sabotage charges (the
Metropolitan-Vickers affair) and he is told their safety depends on his silence
(though why the NKVD do not just assassinate him as they apparently had Kleb is
unclear). Back in Britain he agonises
over whether to risk their deaths to possibly save millions. Once the engineers have been freed, however,
he is able to tell his story (adding to testimony by Malcolm Muggeridge, who is
shown meeting Jones in Moscow), only to find a tide of misinformation drowns
out his account.
The worst comes from the odious Walter Duranty of the New York Times (curiously, Jones and
Duranty were both Cambridge graduates, Duranty of Emmanuel, Jones of
Trinity). Contrasting with Jones’s
principled approach to journalism, Duranty is a cynical shill parroting the
line of the Soviet authorities, denying the magnitude of what is happening in
Ukraine. To demonstrate his ghastliness,
Duranty invites Jones to a party shortly after Jones’s arrival in Moscow, and
the scene lingers on a decadent debauch in his comfortable apartment, more
Weimar Berlin than revolutionary Russia.
Jones realises Duranty is not going to rock a very comfy boat. The British are less bothered about Ukraine
than their own parlous economic position and maintaining good relations with
the Soviets, so sit on their hands. But
an encounter with William Randolph Hearst on a visit to Wales allows his
account to be published internationally, finally bringing the situation in
Ukraine to a wider public.
George Orwell, himself an icon of integrity, and someone
else who mistrusted Duranty, makes intermittent appearances. The film opens with shots of corn fields and
feeding pigs, but this is not Ukraine, as we see Orwell composing Animal Farm, clearly linking Jones with
the novel’s farmer (which one might not think much of a tribute). Later in the film, Orwell and Jones are
introduced to each other by literary agent Leonard Moore, and Orwell attends a
public lecture Jones gives on Ukraine.
In a telling exchange, Orwell tries to defend Soviet methods, but Jones
firmly disabuses him of the idea they are building a better life. Orwell was
later to have his own negative encounter with Stalinism, in Spain. Yet while he is quite forthright about the
Soviet regime in his 1947 introduction to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, it is significant that he
does not refer to the 1932-3 genocide.
The film is certainly not an accurate biopic: Jones had
visited Ukraine twice before, and the chronology of the period after he leaves
Russia has been manipulated. However, it
highlights how the Ukrainians were treated then, and by implication the
colonialist aspirations of Russia towards its neighbour today. In so doing it will perform a useful function
in promoting the memory of the Holodomor to a wide audience. But it has a bland title, and the one given
to it in Ukraine is more informative – 'Цiна правди' (Price of Truth). Characters wrestle with the idea of what
would become known as ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’, firmly deciding there
is only one truth and it needs to be told, whatever the cost.
(I have a brief anecdote about
the Metro-Vickers affair. At some point
in the mid-1980s, when I was employed by British
Telecom, I picked up a hefty volume of translated transcripts from the
trial, Wrecking Activities at Power
Stations in the Soviet Union. Later, we had some consultants working with
us on a project, one of whom was named Allan Monkhouse. I casually mentioned one day I had a book
about a Moscow show trial featuring someone with the same name, to which he
replied that that was his grandfather.
He did not have a copy of the book so I was happy to donate mine to
him.)
The
film on the second night was a contrast to Mr.
Jones, and more typical of the sorts of film we tend to see at the
Cambridge Ukrainian Film Festival. Ukraïner: The Movie (2019) is a
documentary charting half a dozen interwoven stories of ordinary people doing
ordinary things across the country (apart from the war zone), together forming
a tapestry of life as it is lived by typical Ukrainians outside the big cities.
The audience may have been smaller than
the previous night, but the film had its pleasures.
Supported
financially by the Ukrainian Cultural Fund, it is part of a much larger project
that began in 2016, drawing large numbers of volunteers internationally to
document Ukrainian life and provide translations in order to show the country
both to Ukrainians and to the rest of the world. The emphasis is firmly on traditional
provincial life, and the overall atmosphere one of contentment, lingering on
small gestures and conversations (do all Ukrainian children have classes in
‘Christian ethics’?), the rhythms of which pull the viewer in.
There
are segments about a farmer who practises traditional tree beekeeping, once
considered a lost art but making a comeback, with the bees living in slots in
trees rather than artificial hives; a lighthouse keeper who has to wade salt
flats to get to work; an elderly bus driver who is an enthusiast of the
declining sport of motorcycle football, which he has played for half a century;
a couple who keep goats and weave the most wonderful traditional blankets from
their wool; an old hippy couple who are turning their village into a museum
with their sculptures; and an ex-resident of Pripyat who has returned to the
Chernobyl exclusion zone to document the crumbling structures and burgeoning
wildlife.
Following the screening the
film’s producer Bogdan Logvynenko took questions from an appreciative
audience. He was asked about the approach
to choosing subjects, as the film dealt with small-scale activities rather than
industry or city life, hinting at a retreat from modernity. Bogdan answered that the focus was on what
was distinctive about Ukraine, not what could be seen anywhere, showing aspects
of life there which are under pressure from the modern world.
I saw the questioner’s
point. While it is understandable the
filmmakers wish to show positive aspects of Ukraine, and they are fascinating, there
is a sense it is an idealised image, with no attempt to provide the broader
context within which the subjects live their lives; one would not know from the
film that the country is engaged in a protracted hybrid war with Russia, or
that there are concerns with political corruption. The Chernobyl section is the closest one gets
to controversy, and even there the stress is on regeneration.
Perhaps the producers’ answer is
that for most people, going about their everyday lives, such wider considerations
are irrelevant. The pressing need is to
project a positive image, and preserve traditions that are a key part of the
national identity but which are under threat from modern life. That is fair enough, but if one wishes to
obtain an accurate image of what it means to be Ukrainian as a whole, those
wider considerations surely need to be included. Further documentaries exploring the urban
experience might help to give some balance if the project truly wishes to live
up to its name.
