CONDITIONS IN SOVIET RUSSIA

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21323, 16 November 1934, Page 8

CONDITIONS IN SOVIET RUSSIA

TO TUB BDITO* OF THE PRESS. Sir,—l am loth to enter the Serbonian Bog, but some of your correspondent, Mr J. N. Harle's, comments upon the article by my namesake, Mr A. L. Williams, should not pass without reply. Of course it is possible that in your correspondent we have someone more than a doctrinaire and a partisan. But he does wear the aspect of one who has taken a short cut to final decisions on a most complex and difficult question. Be his qualifications what they may, he finds it easy to decide that the writer of the article "guesses," •'fancies," "imagines," "makes funny and unsupported statements," and "seems to know as little about war and its causes as he does about the motive of Soviet diplomacy and the conditions of the Russian people as a whole." To help Mr Harle and any other students of Russia who may read, may I say that the writer of the article resided and worked in Russia for several years, and was present in Moscow during the Bolshevik revolution: he reads, writes, and converses fluently in Russian; he is a journalist and a trained observer; and he has long been in close contact with keen and unprejudiced students and lovers of Russia. He knows war from the point of view of the serving soldier. It seems to me that the statements of such a witness deserve consideration at least equally with the reports published by the advocates of one particular political theory.—Yours, etc., O. W. WILLIAMS. November 14, 1934. [As this letter is by way of a personal explanation, it is printed without prejudice to J. N. Harle's right of reply, the correspondence having closed subject to that.—Ed., "The Press."]