30 OCTOBER 2004, Page 40

Stalin's passion for poetry

From Oleg Gordievsky Sir: Jane Gardam, writing about Doris Lessing's book Time Bites (Books, 23 October), says that Stalin had a passion for great writers of the USSR. As a matter of fact his passion was so great that he sent several hundred of those writers to the concentration camps where they all died. The greatest loss was the death of two geniuses of Russian poetry: Nikolai Klyuev and Osip Mandelstam.

Oleg Gordievsky

London WC2