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Winifred Utley (London, England, January 23, 1898 – Washington, D.C., United States, January 21, 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. In 1939 they moved to the United States where she became a leading anti-Communist 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.〕 ==Early life and work== Freda Utley's father was involved with George Bernard Shaw, the Fabian Society and labor struggles before becoming an attorney, journalist and businessman. He was introduced to Freda Utley's mother by Edward Aveling, Karl Marx's translator and longtime partner of his daughter Eleanor. 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 1926 General Strike and what she calls the "betrayal" of the workers by the British Trade Union Council and the Labor Party made her more favorable to communism. After visiting Russia as the vice-president of the University Labour Federation in 1927, she joined the British Communist Party 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 labor 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 Jewish 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 ), September 24, 2007.〕〔Francis Beckett, (How the son of a British communist became a leading Washington conservative ), The Guardian November 4, 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 expose 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 April 14, 1936, Soviet police arrested her husband, then head of an import/export government group. Unable to aid him, she left soon after for England with her young son Jon, using English names and passports.〔 There she mobilized important leftist friends like George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell〔Royden Harrison, (Bertrand Russell and the Webbs: An Interview ), from "Russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies 5," issue 1 (1985), article 6, 48.〕 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 ).〕 She did receive two post cards from Arcadi reporting his five years' sentence to an Arctic Circle concentration camp 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 March 30, 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 labor 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 Freda 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 Harold 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 ISBN 0-02-923678-9〕 Her goal was to make for herself an international reputation and prove her communist credentials in order 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.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Freda Utley」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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