Pyotr Yakir
Sir: Regarding Mr Robert Conquest's attack (Letters, May 19) on me and you as prostitute and pimp respectively over what I wrote about Pyotr Yakir, I am appalled at his deftly selective misreading of what I wrote and his out-of-hand rejection of the absolute historical facts that I wrote in faithful detail of my encounters with Yakir.
Obviously, as a well-known fighter for Russian freedom, which 1 do not and never did claim to be, Mr Conquest ceases to be a historian. As a historian, he should note down carefully what I wrote and, if necessary. amend his views, even though it understandably pains him that I should have aired these facts through your journal.
Understandably? Perhaps no longer. It is of the essence of my account that Yakir has crossed the Rubicon by turning state's evidence. Mr Conquest says Yakir has been held incommunicado. But when dissidents at large are brought in for questioning, they have reported that they are confronted by Yakir as a sort of inquisitor. Yakir has thus been execrated by others long before me. I even wrote that I would never have written as I did, despite my distaste for Yakir personally, were it not for his new and unsavoury role. But Mr Conquest seems to wish to insist that my role is the unsavoury one because he is in the business of attacking the Soviet Union and I am not.
As for my other writings, especially the ones on the Jewish emigration from Russia, it is true that the Soviet press cited my writings — but very selectively, just as Mr Conquest has done. When this happened, I promptly stopped writing my honestly-held views on that subject. In fact, I abandoned the writing of a book, which, like my other writings, were meant for free people to read. But this is a dangerous occupation, it seems.
You, Mr Editor, did not help offset Mr Conquest's headlong charge at me by cutting out the part where 1 mentioned poor old Andrei Amalrik whom I greatly respected. Amalrik, unlike Yakir, is a brave and humourous scholar who nearly died M prison of menengitis. (Dare I mention that his wife Gyusel told me that the doctors in prison saved his life? Or is that being too complimentary to the Soviet system for Mr Conquest's lights?). He is still there, but will one day be let out. 1 hereby salute him and take my hat off to him. But I'm sorry, 1 do not have such an opinion of most of the other dissidents 1 met.
One more distortion of Mr Conquest's: I did not say that an influential group of Western correspondents take an opposite view to mine. I said took, Mr Conquest. Nuance! Find out what they thought and think of Yakir, whom you have never met.
This is not the place for me to state my views of the whole troubled issue of freedom and dissent in the Soviet Union, but the suggestion that I am some kind of defender of the Soviet regime would be preposterous to anyone who takes the trouble to read me in toto, not just on these particular issues.
As I have said, I try to write for free people; and that is why 1 have also been attacked in the Soviet press and been reprimanded by the Press Department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry like all other correspondents in Moscow worth their salt.
After seven years as a correspondent in Moscow, I left of my own free will though I could make a much better living by staying there and being the kind of good boy that Mr Conquest paints me as being. But it is a terrible place to work if you have honest held, individual opinions and thus end up treading on everybody's toes. Sorry to have trodden on yours, Mr Editor, by getting you into hot water with such an important man as Robert Conquest. But that is what you get for staying so long in Moscow and seeing things warts and all.
David Levy Apt. 1607, 745 York Mills Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada.
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