Daily Telegraph – 26 August 1987

It is regrettable that Lady Lothian, in a letter published on the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (August 21), should seek condemnation of the Government for rightly shunning the so-called "World Congress of Women" held in Moscow from June 23-27.

The invitations may, as she states, have formally been issued by the "Soviet Women's Committee", but the Congress was in reality the ninth in a series dating from 1945 and orchestrated by the Stalinist propaganda front organisation, the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF).

Like its British affiliate, the National Assembly of Women, the WIDF was proscribed by the Labour Party as a Communist front body for over 20 years, until the abolition of Labour's Proscribed List in 1973.

It was the NAW which organised the British delegation to this propaganda congress, which was opened not just by Gorbachev but by the Australian Communist President of the WIDF – a lady who was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1978. For many years the WIDF has been based in East Berlin.

Closer cultural contacts with the USSR are an entirely different matter from co-operation in the schemes of the bogus fronts of the Soviet propaganda machine. The Women of the Year Association (which Lady Lothian represented in Moscow) may have been unaware of the record and credentials of the WIDF. Otherwise, its members should be ashamed of lending respectability to this discredited organisation and its "Congresses".

Dr JULIAN LEWIS
Director
Policy Research Associates
London SE1