Soviet economy

Press, 23 June 1981, Page 16

Soviet economy

Sir,—lt is gratifying to see in your issue of June 13 the article, “Soviet claims of good oil prospects,” by a Novosti Press Agency journalist, Alexander Podakin, who gives your readers a more enlightened understanding of Soviet reality than is likely to be given in articles by British and United . States journalists. In the latter category is the article from the notoriously right-wing London “Observed,” .“Russia’s peasants are still an enigma to Soviet Communism,” by Mark Frankland, (June 13), which is to put

it mildly., unadulterated trash. Frankland's figures are out of date. Farm workers constitute not a quarter of the working population, but 15.1 per cent. The class divisions of the tsarist era have been abolished, landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants and poor peasants. The Soviet State . and collective-farm worker is a highly skilled, highly qualified worker, the sophistication of whose mechanical equipment is second to none — Yours, etc., M. CREEL. June 18, 1981.