GOD AND THE SOVIETS
Sia,-L-Mrs. E. M. Horsley, the publisher's editor responsible for bringing out in English God and the Soviets by C. de Grunwald, says that in my review of the book 'I went beyond the bounds of fair comment.' 1 am afraid she is wasting her time (and your space) trying to cover up his mistake in this manner.
The author does not warn the readers that his account of government and church relations since 1917 is based entirely on 'official and semi-official documents' as Mrs. Horsley claims. On the contrary, he is at pains to emphasise that he is concerned with the real situation, and therefore his failure even to mention the, mass martyrdom of the priests in the 1930s is most significant. I fully agree with Mrs. Horsley that it is hardly likely that M. de Grunwald would adopt the uncritical attitude of a casual holiday-maker. I thought I had made it clear that this is only the first impression and that in fact his attitude is that of an apologist for the Communist regime. The phenomenon of 'sovietophilisin' among old Russian émigrés is well known.
Whatever M. de Grunwald may write to his pub- ishers now, his description in the book of pre-1914 Tashkent, a city of 200,000, as a 'hamlet' is absurd. As for the number-of Uzbek students, it is not clear, in the absence of a precise reference in Mrs. Horsley's letter, who is responsible for the muddle, the Chair- man of the Council of Ministers of Uzbekistan of M. de Grunwald himself. If Mrs. Horsley reads her own quotation from the Statistical Yearbook for 1961 a little more carefully, she will' see that it is consistent with my figure, not with M. de Grunwald's. The fig- ure of 53,530 Uzbek students in 1960-1 is given in Vysshee obrazovanie r SSSR, Moscow 1961, page 85. Of these, 47,758 were studying in Uzbekistan itself; the rest of the 101,271 students at higher educational establishments of that republic belonged to other nationalities. 1 do not suggest that the figure of 1,327,000 is imaginary. But it has nothing to do with Uzbek students: it is thv number of elementary and secondary school pupils in Uzbekistan in 1958-59 (Narodnoe khorzyalivo Uzbekskm SSR v 1958 g., Tashkent 1959. page 200)1 Science. Houghton Street, A ldwych. 411C2
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