Letter to the Editor – Quadrant December 1998. SIR: M. Rathbone (September 1998) rejects my claim that the brutality of Western intervention against the 1917 Russian Revolution contributed to later brutality. He says the intervention was peripheral. Maybe. But my own conclusions based on living and working in the Soviet

Published in The Quadrant November, 1997 SIR: During the Khruschev liberalisation years of the early sixties, I was working in Australia’s Moscow embassy. In those days it was not hard to meet Russians critical of the regime. But on one thing they were all agreed. This was the correctness of

SIR: Brett Mason (September 1995) quite misunderstands my points. I agree with him entirely when he says that Canberra fifteen years ago was filled with soft leftwingers apologising for communist regimes. My point was that when the Vietnam intervention was getting underway another fifteen years earlier the Canberra intellectual climate