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 conservative writer, thinker and activist with her respected books The Dream We Lost in 1940 and Odyssey of a Liberal and many others. With Jon and his family, she settled in Washington, where she died at 80, having learned of her husband’s death, but never knowing the circumstances.
In 1991, Jon began contacting the Russians, and eventually made multiple trips to Russia where he eventually found the fate of his father. “Copies of files detailing his arrest, indictment and execution order were sent to me by the FSB, successor to Russia’s notorious KGB,” he told me. “Incredibly, it still has detailed records of political prisoners and willingly provides information and help to searchers like me. They also gave me three photos of my father from the file, taken at the time of his arrest in 1936. They are in better condition than any that my mother had preserved. In Moscow’s FSB library, I held the files of his interrogation in my hand.”
I met Jon in the early days of Antiwar.com, and his commitment to the cause of peace and his assistance to this Website has been invaluable. Jon is still a welcome member of the conservative inner circles in Washington, DC, in spite of constantly handing out Antiwar.com’s latest articles to the often-uncomfortable insiders.
Check out Jon Basil Utley on the Web:
Antiwar.com archives
Americans Against Empire
Frida Utley’s Writings