GOD AND THE SOVIETS Sus,—It seemed to me, as the
publisher's editor responsible for this book, that the review of our publication God and the Soviets by Censtantin de Grunwald, in your issue of December 8, went rather beyond the bounds of fair comment. The author is an historian of international reputation, a contributor to the Revue des deux niondes and the Revue de Paris, and himself a native of Russia : it is hardly likely that he would adopt 'such an uncritical altitude as could only be excusable in a holiday-maker bliss- fully unaware of, and scarcely interested in, the basic facts of Soviet life.'
The charge that our author 'passed from the year 1927 straight to 1941, thus making no mention whatsoever of the period of the worst persecution' is rather beside the point, since Mr. de Grunwald's
object in this book is to give an account of the present and not of the past. He had also, at the be- ginning of Chapter 3, made it quite clear that 'the time has not yet come to give an objective and im- partial picture of religious life in Russia during the first twenty years of the Soviet regime.' All he claimed to do was define briefly from official and semi-official documents the attitudes adopted by the government and leaders among the clergy from 1917 to our own day.
Your reviewer, Mr. S. V. Utechin, then takes as examples of the author's poor powers of observa- tion his reference to Tashkent. Mr. de Grunwald writes to us: 'I reaffirm my description of Tashkent, prior to the First World War, as a bourgade poussierease. The town was at that time the seat of government for the area, and possessed a court of justice and a secondary school, but the houses were all of wood, the streets deserted, and places of entertainment non-existent. The impression con- veyed by the whole was of a settlement which, although it might be sprawling, was primitive, and lost in the great spaces of central Asia.' As for your reviewer's claim that official Soviet statistics give the number of Uzbek students for 1960-61 as 53,530, Mr. de Grunwald took as his source a pub- lication by A. Alimov, Chairman of the Council of Ministers in Uzbekistan, which gives the figure of 1,327,000. In confirmation, one might quote the Statesman's Yearbook for 1961 which says:
'In 1960-61 there \ !ere 7,200 elementary and secondary schools with 1,551,000 pupils, 31 higher educational establishments with 101,300 students, 79 technical schools with a total of 52,600 students.' E. M. HORSLEY Hutchinson and Co., 178-202 Great Portland Street, W 1
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