John Barber

It is good to know that Boris Kagarlitsky foresaw the prospect of ‘reform from above’ in the USSR as early as 1980 (Letters, 19 January). However, this is not the point. It was clear then to many observers inside and outside the Soviet Union that change of some kind was inevitable. There had even been abortive attempts at economic reform during the Brezhnev period itself, and Andropov’s drive...

John Barber writes: Mr Weintraub is quite entitled to question my assessment of J. Arch Getty’s Origins of the Great Purges, but it might help if he were to read the book. Unfortunately, he has failed to grasp its most important conclusion. Getty does not simply show, as others have indeed already done, that corruption, inefficiency, and resistance to official policies, existed in the Soviet Union...

SIR: Reviewing Norman Stone’s The Eastern Front, 1914-1917, E.H. Carr wrote of the author’s ‘slap-dash impressionism’ (New York Review of Books, 29 April 1976). The same characteristic marks Stone’s defamatory review of Carr’s life and works. Among the many distortions, half-truths and mistakes, the following stand out: 1. The unjust claim that Carr was mesmerised by the ‘power of Stalin’...