.COLD WAR FOR EVER ?
SIR Mr. Beloff's point is a serious one with which space permitting, I should have dealt. A Kremlin quarrel might indeed start, not .ndeed a civil war or.revolution, but a cumu- lative landslide of small changes, ending in _ much more reasonable regime, But this was Precisely the result of the Beria quarrel, which has now been settled in favour of the reactionaries. We do know now what hap- Pens when the new masters " disagree between
reaction. This, then, is not the moment for optimism about Kremlin quarrels, when the ' liberals' have just lost.
In his Bill for Stalinism,' Mr. Chancellor seems to me too optimistic, and that on a strained interpretation of the facts. How does he know that Shatalin " can ill be spared from Moscow in these troublous times " ? It is only logical to send a top Russian to Georgia, and in the Kremlin faction fight—if any—a supporter in Tiflis might be very useful to Malenkov. The Latvian purge, again, is merely the necessary liquidation of Beria's previous activities, or is it to those that Mr. Chancellor refers ?
As for Kazakhstan (where Beria never had influence), the " appalling state of affairs which is revealed " is not nationalism at all, but the alleged neglect of that infertile area's alleged agricultural potentialities. Ponomarenko, the new Russian first secretary, is an agricultural expert. So, it seems, is Brezhnev, his aide, who was not to my knowledge " removed from Moldavia last summer in disgrace." He appears simply to have left Moldavia when in March he was appointed chief political commissar to the Navy.
Not all of Mr. Chancellor's evidence is of this doubtful kind. But it looks to me as if Moscow had the Soviet minorities reasonably well in hand.—Yours faithfully, New College, Oxford P. 7. D. WILES
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