Winifred Utley (23 January 1898 – 21 January 1978), commonly known as Freda Utley, was an English scholar, political activist and best-selling author. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1927 as a trade union activist, she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1928. Later, married and living in Moscow, she quickly became disillusioned with communism. When her Russian husband, Arcadi Berdichevsky, was arrested in 1936, she escaped to England with her young son. (Her husband was executed in 1938.)
In 1939, the rest of her family moved to the United States, where she became a leading anticommunist author and activist.Professor D. A. Farnie, Freda Utley, Crusader for Truth and Freedom, which is excerpt from Chapter 30 on Freda Utley in Britain and Japan, Biographical Portraits, editor, Hugh Cortazzi, Volume 4, London, Japan Society, 2002, 361–371. She became an American citizen in 1950.
Early life and work Utley's father was Willie Herbert Utley (1866–1918); her mother was his wife Emily Williamson. Willie Utley was involved with George Bernard Shaw, the Fabians, and labour struggles before becoming an attorney, journalist and businessman. He was introduced to her mother by Edward Aveling, Karl Marx's translator. In her memoirs, Utley describes her early influences as "liberal, socialist and free-thinking, strongly colored by the poetry of revolt and liberty and legends, stories and romances of heroism and adventure."Freda Utley, 'Odyssey of a Liberal: Memoirs, Washington National Press, Inc., (1970), Chapter 1 and 2.
Utley was educated at a boarding school in Switzerland, after which she returned to her native England to earn a B.A. degree followed by an M.A. degree in history (with first class honours) at King's College London. The UK General Strike of 1926 and what she calls the "betrayal" of the workers by the British Trade Union Council and the Labour Party made her more favourable to communism. After visiting Russia as the vice-president of the University Labour Federation in 1927, she joined the British Communist Party (CPGB) in 1928.Freda Utley, Odyssey of a Liberal: Memoirs, Chapter 5. Utley writes about her conversion: "It was a passion for the emancipation of mankind, not the blueprint of a planned society nor any mystical yearning to merge myself in a fellowship absolving me of personal responsibility, which both led me into the Communist fold, and caused me to leave it as soon as I learned that it meant submission to the most total tyranny which mankind has ever experienced."
From 1926 to 1928, she was a research fellow at the London School of Economics. During this period she focused on labour and production issues in manufacturing, in her case, the textile industries of Lancashire, then beginning to face competition from operators in India and Japan. In 1928, she married Russian economist Arcadi Berdichevsky who had been working in England for Arcos, the Soviet trade mission.Georgie Anne Geyer, Son Solves Mystery of Father's Death in Soviet Gulag , Uexpress.Com, 24 September 2007.Francis Beckett, How the son of a British communist became a leading Washington conservative, The Guardian 4 November 2005. After a visit to the Soviet Union in 1928, the Communist International sent Berdichevsky and Freda Utley on missions to Siberia, China and Japan, where she lived for nine months. In 1931, she published her first book, Lancashire and the Far East which established her as an authority on the subject of international competition in the cotton trades.
Upon her return to Moscow with her husband, she became disillusioned with the system's inability to provide decent medical care or housing as well as the corrupt, hierarchical Communist Party system.Freda Utley, The Dream We Lost: The Soviet Union Then and Now, John Day Company, New York (1940), Chapters 3 and 4. Living in Moscow from 1930 to 1936, she worked as a translator, editor and a senior scientific worker at the Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economy and Politics. During this time she also wrote, from a Marxist perspective, Japan's Feet of Clay, an exposé of the Japanese textile industries that also attacked Western support for Japanese imperialism. The book was an international bestseller, translated into five languages, and solidified her credentials in communist circles.
On 14 April 1936, Soviet police arrested her husband, then the head of an import/export government group. Unable to aid him, she left soon after for England with her young son Jon, using British names and passports. There, she mobilized important leftist friends like Shaw, RussellHarrison, Royden (1985). "Bertrand Russell and the Webbs: An Interview" . Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies. 5 :44–49 and Harold Laski to try to find Arcadi and even sent a letter directly to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.Jon Basil Utley, About Freda Utley, Atlas Foundation . Utley tried to get CPGB leader Harry Pollitt to intercede with Moscow on behalf of her Russian husband, but Pollitt refused. She received two postcards from Arcadi reporting his five years' sentence to an Arctic Circle prison for alleged association with Trotskyists. (She herself had flirted with Trotskyism.Martin Upham, The History of British Trotskyism to 1949, Part One, (1929–1938), Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Hull, 1980.)
In 1956, she learned he had died on 30 March 1938. It would not be until 2004 that her son Jon Basil Utley would learn from the Russian government the details of his death by firing squad for leading a hunger strike at the Vorkuta prison labour camp.Jon Basil Utley, Vorkuta to Perm: Russia's Concentration-Camp Museums and My Father's Story , Foundation for Economic Education, July 2005. He was "rehabilitated" posthumously in 1961 under post-Stalin rehabilitation laws.
In 1938, Utley published two books on Japan's military attacks on China at the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Japan's Gamble in China, with an introduction by Laski, described Japan as "a police state, governed by a bureaucracy wedded to a plutocracy." The News Chronicle made her a war correspondent and she spent three months in China in 1938, making two trips to the front line. Her 1939 book China at War idealized the Chinese communists. The work aroused considerable popular sympathy for China and helped foment poor relations with Japan prior to World War II.William L. O'Neill, A Democracy at War: America's Fight At Home and Abroad in World War II, p 57 Her goal was to make for herself an international reputation and prove her communist credentials to free her husband. Author Francis Beckett includes a chapter on Utley's ordeals in his 2004 book Stalin's British Victims.Stalin's British Victims, Sutton Publishing Ltd, London, 2004.
Anticommunism Utley and her son and mother moved to the United States in 1939. Believing Arcadi to be dead, she expressed, in the 1940s, her disgust with communism and the Soviet Union in her book The Dream We Lost, later published as Lost Illusions. Bertrand Russell wrote the introduction: "I knew Freda Utley first when she was in the process of becoming a Communist; I continued to know her through the stages of her disenchantment, the tragedy of her husband's arrest, and the despair induced by the failure of all her efforts to procure his release." Utley described her work as emanating from "the only Western writer who had known Russia both from inside and from below, sharing some of the hardships and all the fears of the forcibly silenced Russian people."
In a review, author Pearl Buck wrote: "It is a strongly unassailable indictment of Russian Communism. It is a strongly dramatic story and one interesting enough to make a major novel, the story of a brilliant mind, rigorously truthful in its working". Communist publishers and intelligentsia in both Britain and the US tried to discredit Utley. In the posthumously published book Reagan, In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America, Ronald Reagan's speechwriter wrote about Utley that "many of the intellectuals didn't want to hear what she had to say. She had impressive academic credentials when she came to the U.S. but publishers and the academy closed doors against her. She understood all too well. She had tried communism and learned its falseness. She said only those 'who have never fully committed themselves to the communist cause' can continue to believe in it."Ronald Reagan and Annelise Anderson (authors), Martin Anderson (editor), Reagan, In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America, Free Press, 6 February 2001.
In 1940, Guido Baracchi, a scholar, communist and labor advocate, revealed a letter Utley had written to a friend in 1938: I have not pretended to be a Stalinist but have kept my mouth shut about Russia until now. Naturally I have no illusions left—nor had any before they took Arcadi. I am not a Trotskyist as I have become convinced that all dictatorships are much the same and that power corrupts everyone. Without democracy there can be no real socialism. But I fear the world is progressing towards 'National Socialism' on the Russian-German model. Little difference between them."Murder Will Out, An open letter to members of the Communist Party, Guido Baracchi, 1940 on Marxist.Org. In 1945, Reader's Digest sent Freda Utley to China as a correspondent. The trip resulted in Last Chance in China, which held that Western policies, especially cutting off armaments to the Chinese Nationalists, favored the Chinese Communist Party victory. She began a crusade to name those who "lost China".
In 1948, Reader's Digest posted Utley to (Germany), resulting in Utley's next book, The High Cost of Vengeance which criticizes as war crimes Allied occupation policies, including the expulsion of millions of Germans from European nations after World War II and the Morgenthau plan. She also accused the United States of torture of German captives, the Allied use of slave labourNote: she notes "Asked before leaving Germany on September 25, 1948, whether the transfer of German workers to slave labour in Russia is in contravention of the laws established at Nuremberg, General Taylor said that the evidence concerning this was only 'lay' evidence and that Russia's action ought, in any case, to be considered 'in relation to the existing situation'." in France and the Soviet Union and criticized the Nuremberg Trials legal processes.She noted for instance that at the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials (held after the first set of Nuremberg Trials) "American rules of evidence are not to be applied by the judges. Hearsay and double hearsay evidence is permitted, and it is left entirely to the discretion of the judges whether or not the defense be permitted to question the authenticity or probative value of evidence." Utley's book was excoriated by The New York Times but was according to her own publisher praised by Reinhold Niebuhr in The Nation magazine.Henry S. Regnery, Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher , Regnery Gateway Inc., Lake Bluff, Ill., 1985; Review of Freda Utley's The High Cost of. Vengeance (PDF), Manas Journal, Volume II, No. 51, 21 December 1949.