`RUSSIAN HOLIDAY'
SIR, — Mr. Chappelow's wide-ranging attack merits a reply on the two points where it makes some contact with the review that provoked it.
Soviet food statistics are a very involved subject. Few official figures are available, and those mostly ones of indirect application, like livestock numbers. If to these the latest known Eastern European slaughter rates and slaughter weights are applied, with increases iii the latter to suit increases of fodder sup- plies, etc., it works out that the amount of carcase meat per head of the population was about the same in 1940 and 1953—about 19 kilogrammes (1954 was .a better year; so was 1937). These figures cannot, in any case, be far wrong. (And if we accept Mr. Chappelow's curious theory that the amount of meat is not related to the number of meat-bearing animals, then we can make no estimate at all.)
Soviet figures are, of course, not only defec- tive but suspect. Still, when two contradictory pieces of information are volunteered by an interested party, one a boastful claim and the other an admission of failure, a little common sense tells one which to prefer. But in fact while Khrushchev, in his February speech, certainly used the figure to bolster general remarks about an 'enormous' growth in the consumption of livestock products, he did not assert (as Mr. Chappelow makes him) that there had been a 2.8 times increase in meat consumption between 1940 and 1954, but simply in meat sales—that is, in meat disposed of through State channels and neither con- sumed by the rural population nor obtained on the uncontrolled market by the urban popu- lation. This (a distribution-method statistic, and not a consumption one) is in accord with known tendencies in the USSR.
The other point was my saying that Mr. Chappelow's book was badly written. This is certainly a matter of opinion, but I see that other reviewers agree with me. Failings of style have to be pretty obtrusive before a reviewer of a travel book is likely to notice them at all. I quoted one sentence which struck me as reasonably typical. To be fair to the prospective reader let me try again by asking if he would want to go on with a book beginning : ' "Goin' on yer 'olidays, mate? Where yer goin'?" Thus spake the bus conductor that memorable sunny morning. .. — Yours
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