Pyotr Yakir
Sir: It seems that Mr David Levy (June 2) cannot even see what was objectionable in his remarks about Pyotr Yakir. May I recapitulate? First, he gave an account, highly abusive of Yakir, of an incident in which they were both involved, at a time when Yakir is quite unable to let us have his version. Second, and worse, he vilifies Yakir for having (or being reported as having) broken down after months in the hands of the KGB.
He now has the brazenness to tell us that we have to accept as 'history ' his own version of the incident he describes. And he goes on to suggest that all those correspondents who were in Moscow at that time, and had the highest opinion of Yakir (which pre sumably means, amongst other things, that if they had heard of the YakirLevy incident, they unanimously re-.
jecteci the Levy account), may now have changed their minds. Most of them are abroad, and 'may not have seen this correspondence. When they see it, they will let us know. Meanwhile, we need, not accept Mr Levy as their spokesman. (And it so chances that a few weeks ago I had a letter from one of them in connection with Yakir's Childhood in Prison, which I edited, in which he speaks of his admiration for Yakir and in particular of "the immense human warmth of the man despite the horrors he has lived through.
On June 21, Yakir will have been in prison for exactly a year, without being brought to trial. After arrest, he was held totally incommunicado for a period which has previously proved adequate in breaking prisoners' resis tance, and we only hear even these secondhand accounts of the end of his resistance in the late autumn. If he has indeed been broken, the disgrace is not his, but the KGB's. Yet even the KGB are only doing their foul job: one may feel that gratuitous abuse from outsiders under no such compulsion is even more disgraceful.
Meanwhile, most of us will be remembering Yakir's words to the Times correspondent, Mr David Bonavia, not long before his arrest; that if he confesses, "you will know it will not be the real me."
Robert Conquest 4 York Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive, London SW11
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