"Return to the Gulag: Jon Utley's Search for His Father" DVD

by Etoile Productions

In 1936 Moscow, Jon Utley was two years old when his father, Arcadi Berdichevsky, was sent to a labor camp by the Soviet secret police. His mother, Freda Utley, escaped with Jon to England and then to America. In 2004 and 2006, Utley, embarked upon a search to learn of his father’s fate. Return to the Gulag traces Utley’s journey through former labor camps and cities in northern Russia and his final uncovering of the horrible truth at the dreaded camp city of Vorkuta within the Arctic Circle.

This documentary chronicles the search for one of the millions of men arrested in Russia during Stalin’s Reign of Terror in the 1930s. “Return to the Gulag” depicts the search for details about the fate of Arcadi Berdichevsky, Utley’s father, the chief financial officer of the Soviet Import-Export agency Promexport, who was arrested by secret police at midnight, April 10, 1936. His wife and son never saw him again, and until Jon’s trip never knew the reasons for the arrest or the cause of his death.

Arcadi Berdichevsky’s experiences serve as a microcosm of the all-engulfing great terror imposed by Stalin “when few were spared ominous fear, paranoia, imprisonment, hard labor, and even death,” the film’s narrator explains. Arcadi was arrested without cause, tried by a kangaroo court, and sentenced to hard labor in the Gulag, in Vorkuta, Komi, on the Arctic Circle, in northern Russia. This true story was also the fate of some 18-20 million others in the 1930s who were sent to the Soviet Gulag.

Freda Utley, Arcadi’s British wife, organized an international campaign for his release which included personal letters to Stalin from prominent international figures. All pleas were ignored. Freda Utley, who was an author, scholar, and British trade union leader, and her son, Jon, went for years not knowing even the charges against Arcadi, nor his whereabouts.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Jon Utley, nearly 70 years later, was able to return to Russia and find original files and government photos of his father -- and learn of his surprising death by firing squad in 1938 for leading a hunger strike in the camps.

The documentary includes news and file footage of the life and times of Soviet Russia in the 1930s, in addition to interviews with Ann Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History; Joshua Rubenstein of Amnesty International; and Russian archivists and historians.

Return to the Gulag was filmed on-site tracing Jon Utley’s journey through former labor camps and cities in northern Russia to find the records. Return to the Gulag is a small but revealing window into Russia’s turbulent 1930’s.