Jon Utley Solves Mystery of Father’s Death in the Gulag

Published: September 24, 2007, 11:28 pm

Tags: news

Georgie Anne Geyer writes today about Jon Basil Utley’s journey to find the fate of his father who disappeared into the Soviet gulag. Jon’s mother, Freda Utley, was a prominent American Communist in the 1920s. She fell in love with a brilliant Russian Jewish economist, the handsome, dark-haired Arcadi Berdichevsky, and moved to Russia with him. In 1936, their lives together came to an end with the Soviets’ infamous “knock on the door” at 2 a.m. Freda, unable to help him, soon used her and Jon’s British passports to return to England, where she mobilized important leftist friends, people like George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and Harold Lasky, to try to find out where Arcadi was and even sent a letter directly to Stalin. What camp in the Gulag, that web of labor camps that eventually killed untold millions? So Freda Utley stayed in the West, moving eventually to the United States, and turned totally against communism, becoming a prominent

[ Full article ]

Blog link

Rating: 0

Comments