To the Editor:

I am over seventy and have spent a lifetime reading the pros and cons, the facts and myths, of socialism and Communism, but never have I read anything so profoundly persuasive and wise as Vladimir Bukovsky’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” [January]. In its psychological insight, realism, and impassioned moral affirmation, it is not just another article in a magazine, another excerpt from a book, but one of the great pieces of literature of our time. Only a great moral figure could have written it; and it is a deplorable commentary on the nightmare that is our time that the man who produced it was declared “insane” by the Soviet authorities and is probably so regarded even by those in the West who have abandoned the will to be free.

Harold Mager
New York City