Background
Freda Utley was born in London, England, one of two children born to Emily Williamson and William Herbert Utley, an editor and journalist.
(Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Illusion-Freda-Utley/dp/1406732036?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1406732036
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
https://www.amazon.com/Will-Middle-East-Go-West/dp/1295756412?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1295756412
(FOLLOWING WORLD WAR I FRANCE AND BRITAIN REFUSED TO LISTE...)
FOLLOWING WORLD WAR I FRANCE AND BRITAIN REFUSED TO LISTEN to the statesmen who said that you can have peace or vengeance, not both. They broke their armistice pledge to Germany that peace would be made on the basis of President Wilson's Fourteen Points and "the principles of settlement enunciated" by the American President. They continued the starvation blockade of Germany for six months after the Armistice, in order to force the German democrats who had taken over the government to sign a dictated peace. Having promised a peace without annexations or indemnities, they deprived Germany of territory and imposed a crushing reparations burden on the newly established Weimar Republic. Having promised general disarmament they disarmed Germany without disarming themselves. The victors refused even to discuss the terms of peace with the vanquished who had surrendered on stated conditions which were not fulfilled, and in general dis- credited democracy in German eyes by associating it with broken pledges, national humiliation, and economic distress.
https://www.amazon.com/High-Vengeance-Freda-Winifred-Utley/dp/1911417177?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1911417177
(The Dream We Lost; Soviet Russia, Then and Now by Freda U...)
The Dream We Lost; Soviet Russia, Then and Now by Freda Utley 1940 Hardcover
https://www.amazon.com/Dream-We-Lost-Soviet-Russia/dp/B000J4VRPY?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000J4VRPY
Freda Utley was born in London, England, one of two children born to Emily Williamson and William Herbert Utley, an editor and journalist.
She attended Prior's Field, Surrey (1911 - 1915); King's College of London University (1920 - 1923), from which she received a B. A. (with first-class honors); Westfield College of London University (1924 - 1926), from which she received an M. A. (with distinction); and the London School of Economics (1926 - 1928), where she was a research fellow.
A promising academic career was aborted by her decisions to join the British Communist party in 1927, to visit the Soviet Union that same year.
During the next two years Utley lived with her husband in Japan, returned briefly to England, and in 1930 finally settled down, she thought, in Moscow, where she was a senior scientific worker at the Institute of World Economy and Politics. In 1936, her husband fell victim to the massive purges then sweeping Russia; he disappeared into the Gulag Archipelago.
Having retained her British passport, Utley was able to escape with her son to England. Her year in that country enabled Utley to write Japan's Feet of Clay (1937), a best-selling critique that established her reputation. In 1938 she traveled to China as a war correspondent for the London News Chronicle; her experiences led her to write China at War (1939).
The following year she immigrated to the United States with her son and her mother. In 1940 she published her scathing autobiographical indictment The Dream We Lost: Soviet Russia Then and Now (reprinted as Lost Illusion, 1948). In it she revealed her disillusionment with the Soviet system, which, though aggravated by her husband's arrest on the usual trumped-up charges, was mainly a function of innumerable discrepancies she discovered between her earlier idealization of Stalin's regime and the savage realities of his rule by terror. Although her attack on Soviet Communism appeared after the Stalin-Hitler pact had been signed, and was therefore politically more acceptable than it would have been a year earlier, Utley could not fully capitalize on it because of her unpopular argument that Nazi Germany should be encouraged to attack the Soviets.
She hurt herself in other ways as well. Utley made the mistake of admitting to immigration authorities in 1940 that she had been a member of the British Communist party. This enabled the Justice Department to seek her expulsion the following year, nominally because of her Communist past, but really, she believed, in retaliation against her article "Must the World Destroy Itself? , " published in Reader's Digest, which urged Britain to make peace with Hitler. Though friends saved her from deportation, Utley's obsessive anti-Communism, a natural outcome of her experiences in the Soviet Union, limited her opportunities as a lecturer and journalist during the war years, when the Soviet Union and the United States were allies.
The coming of the Cold War made Utley's message more attractive, thus benefiting her career. In 1944, Congress passed and President Roosevelt signed a private bill introduced by Jerry Voorhis, a liberal congressman from California who would subsequently lose his seat to Richard Nixon, allowing Utley to reenter the United States from Canada on an immigrant visa. She settled in New York City and promptly applied for citizenship, becoming naturalized five years later. Utley's The China Story (1951), an attack on American supporters of Communist China, made the best-seller lists. It was her last successful book.
In later years her career sagged because, except on the issue of Communism, she was never comfortable with conservatives, and her association with Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin alienated liberals. Her last book was Odyssey of a Liberal: Memoirs (1970), which describes, in a sketchy and fragmented way, her life up to 1941. It includes scattered references to her later years. Fiercely polemical, uncompromising, and utterly lacking in political judgment, Utley was at the same time remarkable for her honesty. Indeed, it might be said of her that she was honest to a fault, as when she refused to lie to the immigration authorities in 1940. This was strikingly demonstrated by her 1950 testimony before the subcommittee of Senator Millard Tydings, which was investigating Senator McCarthy's charge that Owen Lattimore of Johns Hopkins University was the Soviet Union's chief secret agent in the United States. Although Utley hated Lattimore, whom she had known in Moscow during the 1930's and could never forgive for whitewashing the purges that had taken her husband's life, she refused to characterize him as a spy: "To suggest that his great talents have been utilized in espionage seems as absurd as to suggest that Mr. Gromyko or Mr. Molotov employ their leisure hours in snatching documents. "
The senators were not impressed by this comparison, and her testimony, since she made no sensational charges, did Lattimore little harm--although she had hoped it would. Utley was the reverse of an opportunist, her success in the 1950's resulting from long-standing convictions that had only recently become fashionable.
During her career she met numerous other writers and intellectuals, a large number of whom she broke with, or was dropped by, because of her ruthless integrity and single-mindedness. These included Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Pearl Buck, John Paton Davies (who was dismissed from the foreign service during the McCarthy era), and others. Her recollections of them were usually uncharitable. An exception is her portrait of Agnes Smedley, a journalist Utley met in China, who supported Chinese Communism to the end of her life. Utley described her as "one of the few spiritually great people I have ever met. " Utley died in Washington, D. C.
(Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)
(FOLLOWING WORLD WAR I FRANCE AND BRITAIN REFUSED TO LISTE...)
(The Dream We Lost; Soviet Russia, Then and Now by Freda U...)
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
(Utley, Freda)
In calling herself a liberal, Utley did not identify with twentieth-century liberalism but, rather, with the nineteenth-century tradition of free thought and rationalism in which she had been raised. She never subscribed to most conservative principles, and claimed never to have liked conservatives as a group, although she was fond of certain individuals. She was a crusading anti-Communist for principled as well as personal reasons but had no interest in capitalism, either intellectually or financially. She was most comfortable with writers like Max Eastman and Sidney Hook, ex-Marxists like herself who had not become true believers in some other religious or economic system.
Freda married Soviet citizen, Arcadi Jacovlevitch Berdichevsky, in 1928. They had one child. He died on March 30, 1938.