TAC associate publisher Jon Basil Utley at age 2 lost his father to the Soviet death camps. Jon’s mother, Freda, never knew for certain what happened after the state police took her husband, Arcadi Berdichevsky. The most she should could learn from a former U.S. ambassador to the USSR was that Arcadi had died in the Gulag.
Reason.tv has produced this short documentary of Jon’s journey to Russia in 2006 to uncover his father’s fate. It’s a personal story, of course, but also a story all to similar to those of millions of Russians, Eastern Europeans, and other victims of the Soviet system.
Thomas O. Meehan 
Just in case Mr. Utley watches this blog I think he ought to know that the reason that people don’t seem to be responding to this story is how utterly inexpressible one’s emotions seem after watching it: Words simply fail.
Truly a fine thing you did, Mr. Utley, not only for yourself and your mother but for all the relatives of all the victims who could not do the same. Given their experience one suspects that among the last thoughts of so many of those victims was the question of whether, as they were told, the world would indeed think their lives were crimes and their murders were just. Even if late, nice to think we can tell them no, and that we remember both them and their worth.
People also ought to be aware of what a remarkable person Mr. Utley’s mother was too. All on her own, essentially, cut quite a swath in the ’40′s and ’50′s, so much so that she was remembered by Reagan. Look at her entry in Wikipedia; amazing woman.
Cheers,