[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Sta,—The description of Moscow as it is to-day, contained in the Spectator of December 26th, is most interesting. We are all extremely anxious to know the truth regarding Soviet Moscow related by a competent and impartial visitor. Mr. T. H. Hilken says : "I saw few loafers or beggars " in Moscow. Professor Sarolea, of Edinburgh University, also visited Moscow comparatively recently, and in his Impressions of Soviet Russia, published in London in 1924, tells a very different story from Mr. Hilken's. He says : "Poverty in Moscow is universal and dismal. The enormous majority of the people are in rags. Misery and squalor obtrude them- selves everywhere. Obviously, the ruin of the upper classes has not brought wealth to the lower. All classes have been brought down to the same dead level of poverty." On the subject of beggary in Moscow, a German visitor and man of science, Professor Erich Obst, of Hanover, writes as follows
in his Russische Skizzen, published in Berlin in 1925: "Cer- tainly everything is not perfect in Soviet Russia. The endless horde of beggars seen in Moscow, -which never lets one rest a moment, clearly proves that the Earthly Paradise is by no means to be looked for in Communistic Russia."—I am,
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