Here is the history of one Ukraine town, a microcosm of Russia, before its independence in 1991. Hughesovka, (later Stalino and Donestk) was a mining and steel town founded in the 1870s by Welsh entrepreneur John Hughes and seventy Welsh workers. This three part TV documentary directed by Colin Thomas and presented by Gwyn Williams and first broadcast in 1991 as a series of 30 minute programmes on BBC2. This documentary won the Best Documentary BAFTA Cymru, 1991 award. Watch a trailer for […]
This book describes the making of the 1991 TV documentary ‘Hughesovka and the New Russia, Dreaming a City’ created by the author and the Welsh historian Gwyn Alf Williams. Focusing on the town of Donetsk in the Ukraine from its origin in eighteen-seventy, when it was a small village occupied by one hundred and seventy people, it documents the historical events from that time through the Russian revolutions, Bolshevism, Stalinism, Nazi occupation, the collapse of Communism and rising Ukraine […]
A statement on the Ukrainian famine 1931-2
At the Bristol Radical History meeting on May 29th, two contributors from the floor asserted that the Ukraine famine of 1931-2 was a creation of the American press of the time. As one of the speakers at the meeting, I thought it best to check my sources before responding. I have now done so and find that this assertion is the opposite of the truth. One reporter, Gareth Jones, visited the famine stricken areas in 1931 and 1933 and wrote honestly about the mass starvation that he had seen. The […]
