Dear Editor

...DEAR EDITOR PASTERNAK As a postscript to my article in THE NEW LEADER of November 17 ("Spanish Falange Attacks Pasternak"), I would like to add the following bit of news which is not without irony...

...The Communists, of course, found themselves in a particularly embarrassing position, since, on the one hand, they found it difficult to justify the humiliation and persecution of Pasternak, but, on the other, they had to toe the Party line, somehow...

...The chances of Doctor Zhivago emerging unscathed from the ordeal look pretty good, if one assumes that in view of the Franco regime's vaunted anti-Communism whatever is offensive to the Soviet dictatorship ought to be worthy of consideration here...

...Madrid RICHARD SCOTT MOWRER Italian writers and intellectuals at large have expressed indignation and anger at the way the author of Doctor Zhivago has been treated in his own country...

...In contrast, the policy which was pursued-military intervention, in collaboration with the reactionaries-can only lead to new bloodletting, more than a decade after the first intervention...

...Rome SILVIO F. SENIGALLIA GREECE At the time of the Truman Doctrine, there were a few men who argued (I believe Dwight Macdonald was one of them) that intervention in the Greek Civil War would be futile, that a social revolution was inevitable and that the Communist-led wartime guerrilla movement was already, for better or worse, at the head of it...

...But on the official level interest in the Soviet writer is still tempered with disapproval: in the view of the Franco regime, evasion of censorship is not to be commended, whatever the circumstances...

...Under these circumstances, we must reflect that it might have been better had we not intervened...

...One of them rather lamely quoted Manzoni, saying that he would like to see a world without persecutors and persecuted...

...This is not to say that the intervention itself was, ipso facto, wrong...

...The second of the three alternatives appears most likely in retrospect (as witness Stalin's 1949 purge of the Greek Communist leadership), but any of the three would have paved the way for modernizing Greece and ending her antiquated and vicious class struggle...

...Now, the novel that "got away" before the Soviet censors could make up their minds about it will have to go through the censorship channels in authoritarian Spain...

...Had it been accompanied by thoroughgoing social reforms in the manner of MacArthur in Japan and steadfast refusal to deal with the Greek reactionaries, it might have led to better set of affairs...

...And should there be a new Greek Civil War, Khrushchev's hydrogen bombs and intercontinental missiles will make our decision about intervening a lot more difficult than the original intervention, undertaken when the U.S...

...in this sense, our Greek policy may be said to have failed as seriously as our China policy...

...The Soviet authorities, said the manifesto, have launched against one man, a writer, the most violent campaign of threats and abuse seen in the Soviet Union since the Stalin era...

...So it was in the Middle Ages, and the Jesuits played on this...

...New York City GEORGE HYAS THE NEW LEADER welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...

...How this will affect the Spanish edition of Doctor Zhivago remains to be seen...

...However, there are a number of Italian intellectuals who remain in political no-man's land, who have, thus far, refused to commit themselves...

...Spain's censorship is variable, sometimes lenient, more often not...

...had the atomic monopoly...

...However, the validity of such reasoning remains to be tested...

...Individually and through their organizations, including the Italian Writers Guild, they have condemned the decision of the Soviet authorities forcing Boris Pasternak to give up the Nobel Prize...

...The Communist intellectuals, as well as the Communist and pro-Communist press, are the only ones in Italy today who try to justify the present Soviet attitude to Pasternak and his Nobel Prize award...

...It is impossible to say at this point whether such sentences as the following will survive in the Spanish edition: "Men who are not free, he thought, always idealize their bondage...

...In Spanish literary and intellectual circles there is plenty of sympathy for Pasternak in his trouble...

...Doctor Zhivago, therefore, will have to run the gauntlet of the censor's blue pencil just as the works of Spanish authors have to do...

...Aside from this formal appeal, outstanding Italian intellectuals of all political leanings, including Communists, participated in a roundtable discussion of the Pasternak case on the Italian radio and television network...

...More than 300 Italian writers, artists, journalists and intellectuals-including Ignazio Silone, Elio Vittorini, critic Paolo Milano, art historian Lionello Venturi, publisher Livio Garzanti, jurist Vincenzo Arangio Ruiz and museum director Palma Buearelli-signed an appeal published in the Rome weekly, II Mondo, under the title "An Insult to Civilization...

...They invited the free men of the world to sever all connections with all those under the jurisdiction of the Soviet state who publicly persecuted Pasternak, until Pasternak is once more granted, formally and actually, the right to work and participate in the world's cultural life...

...It has just been announced here that Boris Pasternak's novel, Doctor Zhivago, has been translated into Spanish and will be brought out by Barcelona publisher...

...The attitude of these intellectuals, who either belong to the professional anti-anti-Communists or for professional or financial reasons do not want to take sides against the Soviet Union, will be one of the issues to be discussed at a writers' conference which the Italian Congress for Cultural Freedom plans to hold before the end of this year...

...Now, the report on Greece by John P. Capsis (NL, November 10) confirms the fact that anti-Communist military intervention alone cannot make a country healthy...

...As European free intellectuals the signatories condemned Pasternak's treatment as an insult to universal culture and, consequently, as an insult to them personally...

...Privately they may be willing to concede that Pasternak has been treated in a most shameful fashion, but they don't want to say so publicly...

...In that case, Greece organized under a Popular Front government in 1944 (as were most of the European countries) might have either (1) taken the path of Finland, where democratic socialists and agrarian progressives succeeding in expelling the Communists once the economy had been restored...

...Once again, Greece demonstrates that military maneuvers are no substitute for a policy based on militant democracy and social reform...

...It is standard procedure here that nothing may be printed unless it has been cleared first by the authorities...

...Some of them may still decide to sign the II Mondo appeal...

...or (3) become a leader, within the Soviet bloc, of the post-Stalin revolutionary movement, lending crucial support to Hungary and Poland and putting additional pressure on (Orthodox) Bulgaria and Rumania...

...2) followed Yugoslavia in the post-1948 revolt against Stalin...

...Instead, by embracing the greediest elements in the country and driving most progressives into the arms of the Communists, we prepared the way for the new Communist threat of the late 1950s...