Daily Telegraph – 9 September 1987

In my letter (August 26) attacking participation in the so-called "World Congress of Women" in Moscow, to which Lady Lothian (letter, August 31) professes to reply, I specifically did not challenge her contention that the invitations to British "delegates" were sent out directly by the Soviet Women's Committee. Yet, how does she think such a body organised the list of prospective invitees if not via its parallel British counterpart – the National Assembly of Women led by veteran activist Elsie Watson.

Lady Lothian ignores (because she cannot deny) the central point of my letter: that this was the ninth such "Congress" orchestrated since 1945 by the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), which is one of the main bogus propaganda fronts controlled by the International Social Organisations Sektor of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party.

These fronts exist precisely to draw unwary non-Communists into the lending of respectability to whatever propaganda themes are being pushed by the Politburo at any given moment.

The Soviet Women's Committee, by which Lady Lothian sets such store, is in fact the Soviet arm of the WIDF, just as the National Assembly of Women (from which she feels it necessary to distance herself) is the British affiliate of the WIDF. It was thus equally open to the Soviets to have the invitations issued by the one as by the other.

It is never pleasant to discover that one has been duped by organisations of which one knows little, but that is no excuse for Lady Lothian and the Women of the Year Association to persist in drawing untenable distinctions between one arm of the Soviet propaganda machine and another.

Dr JULIAN LEWIS
Director
Policy Research Associates
London SE1