b-b ---------“-‘-- cost IZZimon Books by FREDA UTLEY JAPAN’S FEET OF CLAY LANCASHIRE AND THE FAR EAST THE DREAM WE LOST LAST CHANCE IN CHINA MST ILLUSION FREDA UTLEY FIRESIDE PRESS, INC. WASHINGTON SQUARE PHILADELPHIA COPYRIGHT, 1948, BY FREDA UTLEY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TYPOGRAPHY, PRINTING, AND BINDING IN THE U.S.A. BY KINGSPORT PRESS, INC., KINGSPORT, TENNESSEE TO MY SON, JON, In mmnory of his father. CONTENTS Introduction Vii I How I Became a Communist I II I Marry a Russian I8 III Honeymoon in the Far East 30 IV Spider’s Web 45 V Soviet Social Register 61 VI Revival of Serfdom 67 VII Arcadi Caught in the Web 87 VIII I Learn About Soviet Hospitals ‘05 IX Arcadi’s Awakening “7 X Life in Moscow ‘35 XI A Home at Last ‘57 XII My Son Is Born ‘75 XIII My Institute Is Purged 186 XIV Tricks with Statistics ‘99 xv The High Cost of Communism 215 XVI Red Tsar 223 XVII Scapegoats 234 XVIII Arrest 263 vii INTRODUCTION F REDA UTLEY’S life story as a communist who learned the rigors of totalitarian life in Russia the hard way, was published shortly before Pearl Harbor. The original limited edition could not compete with the turbulent emotions of our country on the verge of war. I was one of those who read and admired Freda Utley’s book, “The Dream We Lost,” and urged her at the end of the war to condense and revise it for republication as an important human document, particularly in the light of present events. Freda Utley has now rewritten her book and given it a I new title, “Lost Illusion.” The dream that Freda Utley lost during her six years in the USSR where she lived as a Russian, was a personal sort of disillusion. Today, aspects of her shattered dream are shared by so many others that her book now has a universal quality. Without ever having lived through the experiences which Miss Utley retails so vividly, most of us who read her book hoped that at the end of World War II Russia would take her place beside the capitalist nations to form one world. We hoped and believed that, by diplomatic give and take and for reasons of mutual self-interest, we could do business with Stalin and the Kremlin. Stalin himself, if one remembers correctly, concurred in that belief. Now, as we survey the recent wrecks of illusion, Miss Utley’s account of her stay in Soviet Russia assumes a new importance. ix X Introduction The more we can learn about the Russian mind, and how it works under its present controls, the better we will under- stand events and attitudes that seem incredible to us. “Lost Illusion,” more than any other book with which I am famil- iar, succeedsin giving a comprehensible picture of this mind. One of its great beauties is that the author never set out consciously to do so. She has achieved it by indirection. There are, one recalls, several other narratives, widely read and designed along similar lines. Among them, Eugene Lyons’ “Assignment in Utopia” comes first to mind, but Mr. Lyons, though once as much an enthusiast for the Com- munist experiment as Miss Utley, stepped behind the Iron Curtain as a newspapermanand an American citizen. Freda Utley went from England with her Russian husband prepared to throw in her lot with the people. She was a unit of the Marxist State, and one of the few who have escapedto tell. “I Chose Freedom” is a more recent book, but its author, Victor Kravchenko, was a Russian, reared in the Russian Communist party, and consequently speaks across the Rus- sian chasm. Freda Utley was born an English woman, taught in the best British tradition and became a trained observer and an excellent writer. Thus she can describe her Russian adven- tures in terms that are to us here entirely understandable, with reactions close to what ours might be in a similar situa- tion. No other Westerner who broke with the Communists has had quite her intimate experience with the Russian way of life. No Russian, or other foreigner, has been able to describe as she has the details of crowded living, servants, childbirth, the decline of belief in standards of behavior, the loss of integrity under police state government. “Lost Illusion” is a moving and tragic human document. Introduction xi Yet though it is written with deep emotion and conviction, it is also written with honesty, fairness and detachment. There could not be a better time than now for presenting a new and revised edition. JOHN P. MARQUAND Newburyport, Massachusetts. October I, 1947 &ost IZZusion Xow I Became a ~om7iwnist FIRSTVISITED SOVIETRUSSIA in the summer of 1927, when Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” was still in force and Trotsky not yet exiled, although he had been eliminated from the political scene. The people were enjoying a measure of prosperity and a degree of liberty unknown three years later. There was still a so- ciety which might be called semi-socialist, but signs of degeneration were perceptible if I had had the wit to see them. But I did not see them. As a delegate, an enthusiastic and youthful Communist recently emerged from the chrysalis of the British Labor Party, I believed most, if not all, I was told. I was without previous experience of a police state to teach me that no one in Russia would dare speak his mind to a foreigner. My own days as a resident of Moscow were still far off. Such Russian friends as I had, although not all were Bolsheviks, fervently believed in the “good society” being created in the USSR. “One’s character is one’s fate,” and character is mainly the product of environment. It is only in middle age one sees how the influences of youth have determined the course of life. Those influences in my case were both I 2 Lost Illusion socialist and liberal. A passion for the emancipation of mankind, rather than the blueprint of a planned society or any mystical yearning to merge myself in a fellow- ship, led me to enter the Soviet Union and to leave it six years later with my political beliefs and my personal happiness alike shattered. I came to communism via Greek history, the French revolutionary literature I had read in childhood, and the English nineteenth-century poets of freedom. I came, not in revolt against a strict bourgeois upbringing, nor because of failure to make a place for myself in capitalist society, but profoundly influenced by a happy child- hood, a socialist father, and a Continental education. For me, then, the communist ideal seemed the fulfillment of the age-long struggle of mankind for freedom and jus- tice. My studies, both of ancient history and modern eco- nomics, made me abhor servitude in any form, and the Communists seemed to me to be the only socialists who really believed in world-wide equality and liberty. Yet the same influences which turned my hopes toward Rus- sia were to make it impossible for me to accept the Soviet regime once I came to know it intimately. I was, in Stalinist phraseology, a “rotten liberal,” a “petty bourgeois intellectual”-one who foolishly de- sired social justice, freedom, and equality, and who im- agined that socialism meant an end to oppression and in- justice. My mother, daughter of a radical Manchester family, How I Became a Communist 3 had met my father, William Herbert Utley, at the age of sixteen. Edward Averling, the son-in-law of Karl Marx and the translator of Das Kapital, brought him to my grandfather’s house. My grandfather, although a “bourgeois,” being a manufacturer, was a free-thinker and a republican, and boasted of how his wife’s mother, when old and very ill, had hidden the great Chartist leader, Feargus O’Connor, in her bed when the police were searching the house for him. My mother, one of nine children, had shown unusual independence by leaving her comfortable home to train as a nurse in London. There she secretly married my father against the wishes of my grandfather, who con- sidered marriage to a poor journalist most undesirable. My father was then editorial writer and music critic on the London Star, the most famous liberal newspaper of the time. George Bernard Shaw, its dramatic critic, was his friend, as also were Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other Fabians. For a time my father acted as Secretary of the Fabian Society. He would have stood for Parliament as a Socialist had not my arrival prevented it. Members of Parliament were not paid a salary in those days and I was the second child, so a political career was out of the question. In the years before he had a family to support, my father had taken part in the great labor struggles of the late eighties and early nineties. He had been arrested with John Burns at a demonstration of the unemployed in Trafalgar Square and had spoken from the same platform as Friedrich 4 Lost lllus~on Engels in Manchester. Half a century later I was to find my father’s name on documents in the library of the Marx Engels Institute in Moscow. His influence over me was profound, and he early im- planted in my mind those libertarian values which have consciously or unconsciously motivated my life. His so- cialism, like that of many other Englishmen, was colored and humanized by the nineteenth century liberal atmos- phere.