TALKS ON RUSSIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 789, 3 September 1954, Page 5

TALKS ON RUSSIA

Sir-I have been waiting for someone to comment on the fantastic behaviour of the NZBS in inviting Mr. Norris Collins to broadcast seven talks on what he saw in Russia. Since Mr. Collins does not speak Russian and was obviously a sympathetic traveller, guided through a few Soviet "show places," his talks were little better than Communist propaganda. True, the Russian authorities allowed a few shadows to appear in the picture seen by Mr. Collins, but this would obviously help to make his story more plausible. For some years, books have been appearing which paint a totally different picture of life in Soviet Russia. In 1952 for example, Tadeusz Wittlin, who worked in the slave labour camps, published A Reluctant Traveller in Russia, and this year Leon Maks, who travelled, on forged papers. through such places as Irkutsk, Tashkent and Syktywkar, has published Russia by the Back Door. Now there are a number of people in New Zealand with first-hand experience of this side of Soviet life. Will the NZBS seek out some of these people and invite them to broadcast seven talks on their impressions of Soviet Russia? Not likely. Although the NZBS has allowed itself to be used as a medium for Communist propaganda, this is probably not due to Communist influence, for the fact can be adequately explained in terms of Liberal stupidity. Our openminded Liberals will wake up to the menace of Communism about half an hour after their throats are cut.

G.H.

D.

(Palmerston North).

Sir.-I wonder where A.B.C. got the idea that Christianity has ever been the philosophy of the Western’ world. Surely, history and current observation prove that the Western world bases its patterns of action upon materialism and power politics.

A. ALLAN

SHEARER

(Wellington).