Winifred Utley (January 23, 1898 - January 21, 1978), commonly known as Freda Utley, was an English scholar, political activist and best-selling author.
Born in London, she was educated at a boarding school in Switzerland. She returned to England and earned a B.A. degree, followed by an M.A. degree in history at King’s College London.
From 1926-1928, she was a research fellow at the London School of Economics, focusing on labour and production issues in manufacturing, in her case, the textile industries of Lancashire, then beginning to face competition from operators in India and Japan.
After visiting the Soviet Union in 1927 as a trade union activist, she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1928. She married Jewish Russian economist Arcadi Berdichevsky that year. 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.
Living in Moscow from 1930-1936, 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 the head of an import/export government group. When her Russian husband, Arcadi Berdichevsky, was arrested in 1936, she escaped to England with her young son. Her husband died in 1938.
In 1939, she and the rest of her family moved to the United States, where she became a leading anti-Communist author and activist.
She died in Washington, D.C. in 1978 aged 79.
