VERDICT ON RUSSIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 551, 13 January 1950, Page 13

VERDICT ON RUSSIA

LOST ILLUSION, by Freda Utley; George Allen and Unwin. English price, 10/6. [REDA UTLEY (not to be confused with Alison Uttley) is an Englishwoman who first visited Soviet Russia briefly in 1927 as a youthful recruit to Communism. One year later she mar(continued on next page)

BOOKS (continued from previous page)

tied a Russian Jew named Arcadi Berdichevsky and after a year with him in Japan, where he worked for the Commissariat of Foreign Trade, and a short time alone back in England, returned to Moscow in 1930 to rejoin her husband. From then until 1936, when her husband was arrested for a "political offence" the exact nature of which was never disclosed, and disappeared into Siberia, and she herself returned to England, she lived and worked in the U.S.S.R. and thus had an. opportunity, given to few foreigners, of personally experiencing the Soviet system in action. Her bitter account of agricultural collectivisation and the liquidation of the Kulaks, of Russian hospitals (a son was born to her in 1934 in Moscow), hous‘ing, prisons, economics, and Communist class-privileges is an impressive contribution to the literature of disillusionment about the Soviet that has poured from Western presses in recent years. One might perhaps be excused for wondering why it took the author until now to give her story to the world, though her answer would be that for a long time she lived in hope that her husband was still alive and wanted to do nothing which might prejudice his release. Yet she admits that for years she has felt that he is dead; and furthermore it is a long time since the end of the war, when expediency might have constituted another reason for silence: There would seem to be no one these days more convinced of the virtues of democracy than the reformed Communist, of more vehement in attacking the system that has been renounced. Freda Utley herself is so whole-hearted in recanting her faith that her language much of the time has the stridency, and often the violence, commonly associatéd with Communists. Possibly she has not been able to break herself of a habit of address acquired during her long sojourn in their camp, and in any case she could argue that her experiences were such as to justify fully her extreme bitterness. That is a good reason: all the same, one feels that a little less militancy and emotional rhetoric in her writing would have given it more weight. It is perhaps not without interest, in these times when the charge is So frequently. made that all radicals, liberals, and "Leftists" generally, are fellowtravellers with Moscow, to notice that Freda Utley came to her faith in Communism via the British Labour Party, but that she was profoundly influenced also by a_ Liberal-Socialist father, a broad and tolerant education, and an intellectual belief in internationalism, social justice, and the other ideals of humanitarian philosophy. In brief, she ‘was what, in Stalinist phraseology, is known as a "rotten Liberal" and a "petty ‘bourgeois intellectual." Yet as she her‘self points out-and it is a fact worth pondering-these very same influences which originally turned her idealistic hopes toward Soviet Russia were later to cause her to reject the Soviet system absolutely and make her its fierce opponent after she came to know it at first

hand.

G.

M.