The diaries of 1930s journalist Gareth Jones are to be exhibited at Trinity College’s Wren Library until the middle of December.

Jones, an investigative reporter who studied at Trinity, was the only Western journalist to witness and write first-hand accounts of the famine in Ukraine, North Caucasus and the Lower Volga caused by Stalin’s collectivisation program in 1932-33. His accounts were published in British, American and German newspapers, but provoked strong opposition from other Western journalists based in Moscow, many of whom concealed the true extent of the crisis in return for continued access to Stalin’s government.

Jones’s diaries were written as he travelled across the Ukraine, and formed the basis of reports he sent to the Western Mail newspaper. The diaries have been kept by his family, and will form part of a display coinciding with a new feature-length documentary called 'The Living' about Mr Jones and the famine which had its British premier earlier this month.

The famine Jones witnessed is estimated to have killed up to ten million people, but the Soviet government and various Western journalists continually denied the crisis and the deaths until the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. Publicly discredited and banned from the USSR, Jones was murdered, aged 29, by bandits in China. At the time, there was speculation that the Soviet government was involved with the killing. 

Jones received the Ukraine’s posthumous Order of Merit 12 months ago for his efforts to expose the existence and extent of the famine.

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