1938: Arkadi Berdichevsky, Jon Utley’s father
March 30th, 2010 Headsman
On this date in 1938, Arkadi (or Arcadi) Berdichevsky, a Russian Jew run afoul of the (pre-KGB) NKVD, was executed in the Arctic Circle prison town of Vorkuta for leading a prisoners’ hunger strike.
Though the powerful whom Stalin purged are well-known to the student of Russian history, Berdichevsky is just one of the countless obscure Soviet citizens who disappeared into the gulag never to emerge again.
Berdichevsky had something most of his fellow-victims did not: an English wife.
Freda Utley and her son Jon Utley — the couple cannily gave the boy his mother’s foreign last name to make it easier to emigrate if it should come to that, as indeed it did — left the USSR and Freda’s communist youth for fame as (paleo)conservative giants.
While young Jon — just two years old when his father was whisked out of their Moscow flat by the spooks — came of age, Freda Utley naturalized as an American and turned against her former ideology with the zeal of the converted.
She savaged the U.S. government officials who “lost China”, and testified at Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s behest in the latter’s 1950′s red-hunt. (Utley also supplied McCarthy some research. She defended Tailgunner Joe until her death in 1978.)
Along the way, Freda Utley learned the date of her husband’s death, but never the circumstances.
That discovery fell to Jon Utley, who made his own fortune in business and became a conservative activist/intellectual himself, notable for his anti-imperialist position. (Utley writes regularly for antiwar.com, and opposed the recent Iraq blunder.)
In 2004, Jon Utley finally obtained the remarkably detailed records revealing that it was a firing squad rather than cold or malnutrition that took his father’s life. Utley then personally visited the sites of that Calvary in the Komi region of Russia.
Jon Utley gives a video interview about the experience and about his own path as an anti-communist here, but most especially recommended for our purposes is his written account of finding his father: HTML form here; pdf here.
Also on this date
- 1883: Emeline Meaker, child abuser, first woman hanged in Vermont
- 1911: Joseph Christock
- 2011: Three Philippines drug mules in China
- 1952: Nikos Beloyannis, the man with the carnation
- 1689: Kazimierz Lyszczynski, the first Polish atheist
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,History,Jews,Mass Executions,Notably Survived By,Posthumous Exonerations,Russia,Shot,Treason,USSR
Tags: 1930s, 1938, anti-communism, arcadi berdichevsky, arkadi berdichevsky, communism, communists, conservatism, freda utley, gulag, jon utley, joseph mccarthy, komi, march 30, vorkuta
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