Russians Leave Germany

Re “Russians Leave Germany Minus Fond Farewells,” June 26:

The proper comparison, on the apples for apples principle, is to compare the 339,000 troops plus the 211,000 dependents and civilian support personnel the former Soviet Union kept in the former East Germany with the several hundred thousand troops and dependents the U.S., Britain and France kept in West Germany, and the conclusion would have been that there indeed was a near parity of forces facing each other in the Cold War. To compare the Russian forces or former Soviet Union forces with the token force of 12,000 the U.S., Britain and France maintained in West Berlin alone is ridiculous.

Why should Germany allow Russian Gen. Matvei Burlakov and his troops to parade in West Berlin, which the Russians tried to destroy from 1948 until 1990? Remember the Berlin Airlift and the Berlin Wall! Why not let Burlakov parade in the dilapidated surroundings in East Germany, which he and his predecessors created in 45 years of oppressive, dictatorial rule?

Did the oppressed of 1956 in Hungary give the Russian aggressors a “fond farewell” when they finally left? They most certainly did not! Did the 1968 Czech oppressed give their oppressors, the Russians, a “fond farewell”? No, they did not! Why would the Russian oppressors now expect a “fond farewell” from the 1953 oppressed?

NORBERT J. KEILBACH

Rancho Palos Verdes

* You are to be commended on your informative article. However, when you say that the 30,000 Germans who turned out to see the Russian farewell parade were “a much smaller crowd than turned out for the Allies,” you have succumbed to the same kind of historical revisionism you expose. The Soviet Union was one of the (our!) Allies in World War II. That is not the only truth erased by the brainwashing of the Cold War.

HAROLD MARCUSE

Goleta