The film tells a little-known story. In 1933, an ambitious young Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, traveled to the Soviet Union and discovered the appalling reality behind the myth of communist utopia. What began as a routine journalistic investigation soon turned into a life-or-death quest to uncover the truth about the Ukrainian famine behind a government cover-up. His efforts were thwarted not only by Soviet censorship but also by Western journalists who were sympathetic to Stalin's regime, most notably Walter Duranty, then the Moscow bureau editor of The New York Times. In real life, Jones was the first journalist to report on the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 in the Western press. But his reporting was not well received because many intellectuals were sympathetic to the Soviet regime. Duranty, who concealed the fact of the Great Famine at the time, was criticized later. The Pulitzer Prize he won for his continuous reporting on the Soviet Union was called "Guilty With an Explanation" by the New York Times.