Letters to the Editor
'The Very Devil'
Prof Alexander Baykov, G. R. Barker
Poets of the Fifties Geoffrey Grigson, R. M. Graves, John Lehmann, Tom Scott A Poet of the Counter-Reformation Evelyn Waugh The Casement Papers Peter Singleton-Gates The PEN Congress Jenny Nasmyth Mr. Parker's Piece John Parker, MP 'THE VERY DEVIL' SIR,—My attention has been drawn to a review by Mr. Peter Wiles in your issue of May 4 of a monograph edited by me, G. R. Barker's Some Problems of Incentives and Labour Pro- ductivity in Soviet Industry.
It is for Mr. Barker to find a way of answer- ing the insinuations which the reviewer has made. Mr. Wiles, however, went beyond an attack on the author and made aspersions not only on the work of a university department, but on the academic competence and integrity of 'good names on the front page,' i.e., mine, as that of the Editor and Head of the Uni- versity Department, and those of two distin- guished professorial colleagues who are active members of the Editorial Board and who read every manuscript published by the department under my editorship.
At present I shall limit my reaction to Mr. Wiles's escapade to the statement that, during a period of over thirty years of my studies in Soviet economics and over ten years of my headship of the Department of Economics and Institutions of the USSR at Birmingham Uni- versity, I have pursued and fostered among my pupils and in publications only one pro, i.e., pro-knowledge. But apparently such an attitude is incomprehensible to Mr. Wiles as he branded distinguished students who aim first of all at accuracy and impartiality as a 'perverse school of Soviet experts..—Yours faithfully, ALEXANDER BAYKOV The University of Birmingham
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