Your report on Vladimir Putin’s progress from pariah to powerbroker (Putin has been taken off the menu and returned to the top table, 18 November) reminds me of previous instances where reactionary toffs let their prejudices over Russia cloud their judgment. For example, the old-school-tie brigade viewed the prospect of an alliance with the Soviet Union to confront Hitler as almost unthinkable at one time, but in due course had to stomach it.
Michael Holroyd, in his biography of George Bernard Shaw, gives an illuminating example of myopic hostility to Russia by the right even when we desperately needed allies.
In 1940, Shaw was invited to broadcast on the BBC Overseas Service. Holroyd describes how, a year before Germany invaded Soviet Russia and 18 months before the United States came into the war, Shaw inserted one passage “that sounded peculiarly Shavian in its prophetic unorthodoxy”, namely: “The friendship of Russia is vitally important to us just now. Russia and America may soon have the fate of the world in their hands; that is why I am always so civil to Russia.”
The Ministry of Information immediately vetoed the broadcast. The minister, Tory blowhard Duff Cooper, declared: “I won’t have that man on the air.” To say something friendly about Russia was not on the cards for another year.
Robert Saunders
Ely, Cambridgeshire
• No pact with Russia comes without a price tag. In the second world war it was eastern Europe as agreed at Yalta. What will it be this time re Syria? Donetsk? Ukraine? The Baltic states?
I therefore advise caution, lest a hasty, emotional decision exacerbate a difficult, dangerous situation.
Dr Marek Laskiewicz
London
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