"The Webbs ridiculed another visitor to the USSR who saw things differently. This was Malcolm Muggeridge, the Moscow correspondent of the Manchester Guardian newspaper. Muggeridge journeyed by train through the famine-stricken Ukraine, witnessing the consequences of official measures. Desperate peasants crowded railway-station platforms as he travelled south. The bloated bodies of starving children orphaned by the deaths of executed or malnourished parents horrified him. The dismissiveness of local party and government functionaries when he questioned what was going on failed to fool him. He refused to be lathered with communist soft soap. Unfortunately his editor in Manchester usually preferred a lighter treatment of the Soviet Union. Muggeridge resigned but not before he got at least some of his dispatches printed. Indeed the Manchester Guardian also accepted an account by Gareth Jones, the Russian-speaking former secretary of David Lloyd George. Jones was horrified by what he witnessed in Ukrainian villages, and gave vivid speeches on the subject after returning to Britain. Muggeridge wrote up a searing account of his own experiences in his book Winter in Moscow."
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People from LondonJournalists from EnglandMemoirists from EnglandEditors from EnglandAutobiographers from England
Original Language: English
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Sources
Robert Service, Comrades: A History of World Communism (2009)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Malcolm_Muggeridge
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Malcolm Muggeridge
Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge (24 March 1903 – 14 November 1990) was a British journalist, author, satirist, media personality, soldier, spy and Christian scholar.
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