This story is the second of two installments. Together, the pieces form an abridged version of an in-progress book of the same name.  In the first piece, published in the Summer 2007 issue of this magazine, a young journalist was cowed in a face-to-face meeting with Stalin, and another young writer sneaked into the Ukrainian countryside to report on a government-instigated famine. After a six-day walk, the writer, Gareth Jones, was forced onto a train by an officer of the Soviet secret service.

All of a sudden, Jones' walk was over. Now, in March, 1933, six days after stepping off a train during a quick stop at a collection of huts on the snowy steppe, he sat next to a chubby-faced secret service man as their train rattled to Kharkov, and for Jones, an uncertain fate. He worried about going to jail.  He worried that he might be convicted of a trumped up charge and perhaps imprisoned for years, without a public trial. He talked fast, explaining to the OGPU officer that he was a journalist and diplomat who had interviewed commissars and high-ranking Soviet officials. He even had interviewed Lenin's widow, he told the officer. "I believed he was thoroughly convinced that any real arrest of myself would plunge Russia and Europe and the United States into a world war," Jones wrote later.

The men eventually arrived in Kharkov, then the capital city of the Ukraine. But rather than haul Jones off to jail, or even a foreign consulate, the officer set him free.  Apparently it was enough to escort him out of the countryside and back into a major city. Free to wander, Jones found the horrors of the famine even on city streets. It was in Kharkov where Jones first heard news that would ultimately change his life. He was sitting in a private house and sipping steaming tea with several diplomats when a servant burst into the room with an urgent report. Six British engineers had been arrested and charged with sabotaging the very power stations they were under contract to help build. Jones was shocked.

"Next morning, however, I looked at 'Izvestia,' and there the news stood in black and white," Jones later wrote in an article. He scanned the list of names and hit upon one he knew, Allan Monkhouse, an engineer for the Metropolitan-Vickers company who had been working in Russia for more than two decades. Jones had met Monkhouse during one of his earlier trips to Russia. "I knew the deep respect in which the British colony in Moscow held him. It seemed incredible that he should be at that moment in the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the OGPU in Moscow," Jones wrote later. For weeks, papers from New York to London carried stories on the arrests. At the time, however, Jones still couldn't accept the news as true.

Jones wandered the streets of Kharkov. What he saw confirmed the famine in every way. Beggars from villages stood on nearly every corner. He saw a bread line more than a thousand people long. One woman in line told Jones that she had been waiting for more than two days, with no guarantee of ever getting any bread. A few blocks away, Jones saw police chasing off more than a hundred people waiting in line outside a store. "We want bread," the people cried. "There's none left," police officers bellowed as they ran off the hungry people.

He later reported on homeless boys who wandered the city wearing filthy rags through which you could see skin covered in sores. Their faces, wrote Jones, were "depraved and criminal." At the train station, where Jones was to board a train to Moscow for the first leg of his journey back home, he saw a crowd of more than 300 such boys. One boy sucked air through a wide-open mouth, his face flush with fever. Another lay on the floor, his tattered clothes exposing shriveled flesh. Jones turned away from such sights as he boarded the train to Moscow, but the images of starvation remained etched in his memory.

Before leaving Moscow for Britain, Jones checked into the Hotel Metropol.  The tiny bar there was a hot spot for foreigners, especially foreign correspondents, and the hotel's clean sheets offered a welcome respite from the chilled suffering of Jones' trek. In the comfortable confines of the Soviet capital, Jones found plenty of time to reflect not just on the starvation, but also on the arrests of the engineers. Three days after the servant in Kharkov had announced news of the arrests, Jones ran into Monkhouse at the British Embassy.  Freed on bail after nineteen hours of interrogation, Monkhouse looked drawn and haggard, but Jones thought the engineer still managed to carry himself with dignity. British Ambassador to the Soviet Union Sir Esmond Ovey was applying as much pressure as possible to free the engineers, who, along with many Soviet engineers, were the public scapegoats for failures to meet lofty and unrealistic goals set out in the five-year-plan. Ovey's efforts had worked well enough to get Monkhouse free on bail, but Jones soon learned that his demands would do little to help the men in the longer term.

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