In her memoirs, Utley describes her early influences as "liberal, socialist and free-thinking, strongly colored by the poetry of revolt and liberty and legends, stories and romances of heroism and adventure.

The UK General Strike of 1926 and what she calls the "betrayal" of the workers by the British Trade Union Council and the Labour Party made her more favourable to communism.

During this period she focused 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.

[6][7] After a visit to the Soviet Union in 1928, the Communist International sent Berdichevsky and Freda Utley on missions to Siberia, China and Japan, where she lived for nine months.

[7][8] Living in Moscow from 1930 to 1936, she worked as a translator, editor and a senior scientific worker at the Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economy and Politics.

[6] There, she mobilized important leftist friends like Shaw, Russell[9] and Harold Laski to try to find Arcadi and even sent a letter directly to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

It would not be until 2004 that her son Jon Basil Utley would learn from the Russian government the details of his death by firing squad for leading a hunger strike at the Vorkuta prison labour camp.

The work aroused considerable popular sympathy for China and helped foment poor relations with Japan prior to World War II.

Bertrand Russell wrote the introduction: "I knew Freda Utley first when she was in the process of becoming a Communist; I continued to know her through the stages of her disenchantment, the tragedy of her husband's arrest, and the despair induced by the failure of all her efforts to procure his release.

"[7] Utley described her work as emanating from "the only Western writer who had known Russia both from inside and from below, sharing some of the hardships and all the fears of the forcibly silenced Russian people."

In 1940, Guido Baracchi, a scholar, communist and labor advocate,[17] revealed a letter Utley had written to a friend in 1938: I have not pretended to be a Stalinist but have kept my mouth shut about Russia until now.

She also accused the United States of torture of German captives, the Allied use of slave labour[19] in France and the Soviet Union and criticized the Nuremberg Trials legal processes.

[1] In 1970, Utley published the first volume of her autobiography Odyssey of a Liberal which recorded her early experiences in Fabian Society circles, education, marriage, life in the Soviet Union and travels up until 1945.

[7] Freda Utley's bestseller Japan's Feet of Clay was criticized for factual inaccuracies and an exaggerated negative view of the Japanese people and a misinterpretation of the class system.

[citation needed] Finally, in 1944, Representative Jerry Voorhis passed a private bill for "the relief of Freda Utley" from the 1940 Alien Registration Act.

[1] Utley's criticisms of Allied policies in her book The High Cost of Vengeance from 1949 included charges of "crimes against humanity":[30] A thoughtful American professor, whom I met in Heidelberg, expressed the opinion that the United States military authorities on entering Germany and seeing the ghastly destruction wrought by our obliteration bombing were fearful that knowledge of it would cause a revulsion of opinion in America and might prevent the carrying out of Washington's policy for Germany by awakening sympathy for the defeated and realization of our war crimes.

This, he believes, is the reason why a whole fleet of aircraft was used by General Eisenhower to bring journalists, Congressmen, and churchmen to see the concentration camps; the idea being that the sight of Hitler's starved victims would obliterate consciousness of our own guilt.

Utley wrote in The High Cost of Vengeance: "I had referred to our obliteration bombing, the mass expropriation and expulsion from their homes of twelve million Germans on account of their race; the starving of the Germans during the first years of the occupation; the use of prisoners as slave labourers; the Russian concentration camps, and the looting perpetrated by Americans as well as Russians.

"[32] In her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, the American historian Deborah Lipstadt critically examines the dissemination and impact of such arguments by Utley and other "revisionists", claiming that "the argument that the United States committed atrocities as great, if not greater, than those committed by Germany has become a fulcrum of contemporary Holocaust denial.