Notebook

What on earth could have possessed Harold Evans to allow the Sunday Times to publish such a foolish and ill-informed farrago of half-truths as its main feature last Sunday, 'Myth of the Yalta "Victims" '?The author, Reuben Ainsztein, seemed to be arguing that it was perfectly defensible for Britain to have handed over two million Russian prisoners in 1944-7 because most of them were 'war criminals'. In particular he sought to substantiate this bizarre claim by discussing the dubious record of some of the Cossack formations we handed over to the NKVD in Austria in the summer of 1945. What Sunday Times readers unfamiliar with the story may not have realised was the quite grotesque way in which Ainsztein distorted and

blurred his evidence. He implied that there were only two main bodies of Cossacks involved, Von Pannwitz's Cossack Corps and the 162 Turkoman Division, both of which (as no one has ever sought to deny) had fought for the Germans and committed atrocities. What Ainsztein failed to mention Was that the group of Cossacks about whom Most of the fuss has been generated — the

24,000 under Domanov and Krasnov,

including many women, children, old men and non-Soviet nationals — had taken virtually no part in the war at all. The only

conclusion one can draw from Ainsztein's

article is either that he has not read the books by Nicholas Bethel! and Count Tol

stoY, or that he sought to mislead the readers (and presumably editors) of the Sunday Times for private reasons of his own. Harold Evans should set the record straight as soon as possible.

Incidentally, I was delighted to hear from Nicholas Bethel! that Radio 4 is to repeat t,ile hour-long programme based on his no.ok The Last Secret (including interviews with a number of the participants) on 9 April. A number of MPs have written to Ian Trethowan asking that the BBC should also

Peat the superb and harrowing television

n inspired by The Last Secret, which was originally shown in November 1975. A repeat planned for the following year was cancelled for fear of fouling up the BBC's negotiations with the Russians over its ills!,arred 'Russian Week'. This extraordinary ■ fin, which actually contained shots of Cossack horsemen riding into British camps in the.Drautal in May 1945, throwing down their arms — not to mention later scenes of wo.men and children being herded onto railway trucks — is one of the most remarka_.ble documentaries the BBC has ever prodUced, and should be shown again at peak viewing time. Amid hot competition for the Most Fatuous Way To Spend Public Money Ever Devised Stakes, the dear old Equal Opportunities Commission (Betty Lockwood prop.) continues to beat all corners to a frazzle. I was delighted to hear from my wife the other day of the Commission's latest essay in job-creation — viz, hiring a gifted team of social psychologists to devise new nondiscriminatory substitutes for some of the sexist words which still cluttcr up our language. Instead of 'he' or 'she', we are now to say 1st' (as in '1st who yvould valiant be', or ,`The poorest ist that is in England has a life to live as the greatest ist'). Even the suffix 'person' (as in chairperson) is no longer sufficiently anti-sexist — entirely neutral words have to be cooked up, like `storee' for `storeman'. Of course the absurdity of all this rubbish is that it does not mislead any

one for a moment. While the saddest

, .

reflection of all is that the psychological roots of discrimination of any kind lie in ceasing to see one's fellow human beings as people, but simply as objects, units, things a process which bodies like the Equal Opportunities Commission do as much to encourage as any racist, bureaucrat or strip-tease proprietor in the country.

Absurd though the Equal Opportunities Commission may be, at least it has not yet had to resort to lying in order to further its dubious ends — unlike another of my least favourite branches of government, the Metrication Board. In the next few weeks, Lords and Commons are to be asked by Mr Roy Hattersley to approve an Order making it an offence punishable by fines and even imprisonment to sell fabrics and car

pets in non-metric measurements. In 1970 I was repeatedly and solemnly assured by two spokesmen for the Metrication Board that 'the policy of metrication is entirely voluntary. Britain's change-over to the metric system will involve no element of compulsion'. This was already a lie at the time (since March 1969 it had been illegal for chemists to sell medicines in non-metric measures). It has become more of one with every year that has passed.

There is Just one detail in the biography of the newly-elected editor of the New Statesman which should be put on record before the official Life is written. In his anxiety to achieve supreme power at Great Turnstile, Bruce Page may have been seeking to make belated amends for another editorial chair which slipped through his grasp some seventeen years ago. Back in 1961, when we were both helping to put together the Liberal News, the weekly organ of the Liberal Party, Bruce and I had a number of discussions about starting a satirical magazine to put Punch out of business. His favoured title for our new venture, I recall, was Bent. Alas, by the time the paper actually hit the streets in October that year, Bruce's predilection for more orthodox journalistic employment had removed him from the field. I, who had been turned down by almost every paper in Fleet Street, was thus left alone to become, at £5 a week, the first editor of Private Eye.

The reputations of those two dynamic shadows of the 'sixties, Wilson and Heath,

continue to crumble remorselessly. Pre sumably we shall eventually see almost every name on the former's Resignation

Honours List dragged through the headlines in some unsavoury connection or another. As for the latter, stories of his petulant egocentricity during the 'signing tours' continue to swirl round every part of the country he visited. I was particularly struck by the tale from Suffolk where, at a slap-up lunch at Robert Carrier's statelyhome-cum-restaurant, Heath disconcerted his hosts by the high-handed way in which he insisted that, as the more important of the two guests, he should 'top the bill' by folloiving his fellow-author and speaker, Joyce Grenfell. After she had given her usual polished semi-cabaret turn, Heath then proceeded to bore the guests into a stupor of anti-climax by reciting the titles, prices and sales figures to date of each one of his ever-lengthening list of non-books and records. When the post-prandial signing began, however, Heath observed to his chagrin that the trickle of people wanting his own books had, soon dried up — whereas , the queue for Miss Grenfell's autograph still stretched round the room. When I saw Frank Longford the other day, his reply to the question 'how have the sales of Heath's last two books been going?' was a very rueful `assez bien'.

Christopher Booker