Strong opinions

4 TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUNDAY

TIMES, LONDON published January /, 1967

I strongly object to the remark in «The Red Letter Forgers» (December 18, 1966) about my father who, according to your four investigators, was shot by a monarchist because «he was suspected of being too Leftwing». This nonsense is distasteful to me for several reasons: it is remarkably similar to the glib data distorting truth in Soviet sources; it implies that the chieftains of the Russian emigration were bandits; and the reason it gives for the murder is false.

My father had been one of the leaders of the Constitutional-Democratic party in Russia long before the Revolution, and his articles in the emigre Rul — the only influential Russian-language daily in Berlin — merely continued the strain of West European liberalism, in the large sense, that had marked his life since at least 1904.

Although there could be found a number of decent elderly persons among the Russian monarchists in Berlin and Paris, there were no original minds or influential personalities among them. The stauncher reactionaries, Black Hundred groups, votaries of new and better dictatorships, shady journalists who claimed that Kerenski's real name was Kirschbaum, budding Nazis, blooming Fascists, pogromystics, and agents-provocateurs, remained on the lurid fringe of Russian expatriation and were not representative in any way of the liberal intelligentsia, which was the backbone and marrow of emigre culture, a fact deliberately played down by Soviet historians; and no wonder: it was that liberal cultural core, and certainly not the crude and ambiguous activities of extreme rightists, that formed a genuine anti-Bolshevist opposition (still working today), and it was people like my father who pronounced the first and final verdict on the Soviet police state.

The two sinister ruffians who attacked P. N. Milyukov at a public lecture in Berlin on March 28, 1922, had planned to assassinate him, not my father; but it was my father who shielded his old friend from their pistol bullets and while vigorously knocking down one of the assailants was fatally shot by the other.

I wish to submit that at a time when in so many eastern countries history has become a joke, this precise beam of light upon a precious detail may be of some help to the next investigator.