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The "Letters to the Editor" columns of the U.S. and British press are an open gate to an open forum. The U.S.S.R.'s Historian Eugene Tarle and David Zaslavsky, co-editor of Pravda, among others, have used it to get their viewpoints in print before the U.S. public. But last week, editors began to suspect that Soviet propagandists were getting set to crowd through the door in droves. Several influential papers had received and printed letters from Moscow, written in perfect English, expensively cabled and signed by private Soviet citizens--or at least bearing their names.

The new space-grabbing technique shrewdly took account of the Western editor's sense of fair play: even if he had a pretty good idea of who was doing what to whom, he printed the letter rather than behave like an editor of Pravda, who certainly wouldn't. Thus the London Times had published two such letters (signed "S. Marshak, Ulitsa Chkalova 14/16, Apt. 113, Moscow") without comment or caveat. The editors were over a barrel: they could neither prove nor brand the letters an outright forgery.

One day last week, the New York Times filled nearly two columns with a letter from Moscow. Signed by one Dmitry Shisheyev, chief engineer in a machine-tool plant, it replied, in good Union Square dialectic, to a Times survey comparing the hours spent by typical Russian and American workers in earning everything from a loaf of bread to a suit (TIME, Dec. 29). Shisheyev had "analyzed" the figures quoted in a Voice of America broadcast; in pooh-poohing them, he showed an uncommonly glib familiarity with U.S. university bulletins and labor statistics.

Raising an almost imperceptible eyebrow (by mentioning that the letter came by prepaid cable), the Times ran Tovarish Shisheyev's dispatch in its news columns. It remained for a Times reader to supply the grain of salt. Wrote Russian-born J. Anthony Marcus, a veteran foreign-trade specialist: "It would not surprise me to learn that the 'chief engineer' had no more to do with the writing and dispatching of the cable than you or I. ... With about 1,600 words in the cable, even at the lowest rate, the cost would have been about $100, close to a month's salary for the average top engineer. . . .

"Even if the money consideration were of no consequence, no Russian, regardless of station in life, and least of all an engineer, would risk even entertaining the thought of communicating with a foreign, capitalist newspaper. . . . Third, of the countless numbers of Russian engineers I have met, both here and in the Soviet Union, not one of them could have possibly written in such good English, or ... displayed such broad knowledge of economic problems here."

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