The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

the best-educated among his followers posed an additional challenge for Jones. His sermons often misrepresented facts or ignored inconvenient ones, especially regarding the Soviet Union. Most Temple members accepted what they heard; if Father said it, it must be true. But a few who knew their history or at least kept up with current events squirmed when Jones insisted that everyone in the Temple should honor the memory of Stalin, whose ruthless purges cost countless innocent lives. In one San Francisco meeting when Jones praised “the Soviet government maintaining the wildlife and tribes and ethnic groups in Siberia,” Garry Lambrev couldn’t help himself. He stood up and asked, “Jim, what about the gulags, about the millions of people murdered?” Jones’s face turned bright red. He shouted, “You arrogant brat, you think you know everything,” and ranted at Lambrev for several minutes, condemning him and any other self-important intellectual who claimed to know everything. “He was screaming so hard that saliva was spraying out of his mouth,” Lambrev recalls. “I was humiliated.”