The Russian prisoners
Sir: It is a curious contemporary British Illusion that the views of epigoni such as Mr Booker and Miss Gainham deserve more notice by the public than those of people Who lived through the events and whose Objectivity was steeled by the hard facts of war, such as Mr Ainsztein.
• Our generation could not afford 'duff' intelligence; it meant lives. The post-war generation has been fed on it; it just means more dividends for the military-industrial Complex. Voices of commonsense from the war generation are not listened to, people Preferring to get their information at third hand from professional anti-communist fiction writers such as Miss Gainham.
For some years I had to study Russia Professionally, before becoming a teacher. To my mind those who go on about the Cossacks, the Crimean Tartars, the Chechen-Ingush etc are just stirring things tiP. We would have done the same in the same dreadful circumstances.
Donald Shirreff Wrightsbridge Farm, Lower Wanborough, Swindon, Wilts.
Sir: By resorting to personal abuse of myself Mr Adler (Letters, 29 April) says more about himself than about the subject under discussion. Fortunately for him, my moral debasement is such that! can bear his Opinion of my views. What needs to be refuted is the proposition which is customary in such arguments, that in attacking Stalinism. Hitlerism is implicitly exonerated. Not so. They were two of a kind. Both caused the deaths of Many millions of their own people and of people of other nationalities. When it suited them they were allies; incidentally against ourselves. Thieves fell out and in the ensuing slaughter Most of Europe was destroyed.
In their monstrous and cynical paranoia thereis not much to choose between them. Hitler's system disappeared from the face of the earth. Stalin didn't. That system still rules much of Europe and Asia. None of its fundamentals has been changed. In a month or so we shall reach the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia which was the last occasion on which that was proved. ?roved, Mr Adler. I was in Berlin in 1953, 111Budapest in 1956, in Prague in 1968. The views I hold were formed by thirty years of direct experience and observation, and my observations included Auschwitz before it was rebuilt. Auschwitz and Kolyma have nothing to recommend them, neither of them, then or now. The only difference is
that A uschwitz ceased to exist in the summer of 1944 and Gulag Archipelago still exists.
Sarah Gainham 11 St John's Hill, London SW11
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