Pyotr Yakir
Sir: The attack you print on Mr Pyotr Yakir is more than usually cowardly, because he is in no position to sue You. The versions of events given by Mr David Levy — even if they are Only the ' events' of petty gossipmon, gering — would clearly not be agreed to by Yakir: and anyone who would t out one-sided stuff of this sort When the victim cannot reply is obviously far more digusting than anyone he may be attacking. Similar slanders, dubiously sponsored, were aPread about Olga Ivinskaya when she Was sentenced in 1961. The d,istaste. Which they evoked might have deterred repetition of the offence. Yakir's courageous struggle is a matter of record. If he has indeed now broken, it is hardly for comfortable Westerners to condemn a man worn by seventeen years in prison, and even now held incommunicado by the KGB for over five months before the first rePorts of his breaking. Of his personal Character I have no direct knowledge: but even Mr Levy makes it clear that an influential group of Western corr.esPondents " take an opposite view of it to his own. Even part from the circumstances of its publication, the Slapdash nastiness of his piece will Probably be, for most of your readers, an adequate criterion for judging the relative merits of himself and Pyotr Yakir. They may not be too surprised to learn, in addition, that he has elseWhere presented in a favourable light one of the worst of Soviet blemishes the Kremlin's Jewish policy — to the degree of being cited favourably in the Soviet media.
For you to have printed this vicious and damaging" nonsense is perhaps even more deplorable, on the principle that the pimp is worse than the prostitute.
Robert Conquest
1 York Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive, SW I I
Previous page
