Sir

I am bewildered by Zhores Medvedev's review of Essays of a Soviet Scientist by Vitalii I. Gol’danskii (Nature 387, 566–567; ).

Most of the review is taken up by a derogatory description of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and of the privileges granted to its members. Only 13 lines are relevant to the subject of the book review. No wonder Medvedev failed to mention the essays “Struggles of a Soviet scientist”, “Why are we lagging behind?”, and so on, and in particular the last chapter, which describes the growing anti-semitism in Russia and contains the open letter to President Mikhail Gorbachev on this dangerous trend.

Medvedev asserts that Russian science “has been saved from complete collapse in the past five years only by grants from George Soros and by renting out the buildings of scientific institutes to businesses and foreign companies”.

Russian scientists are indeed very grateful for generous financial assistance from Soros (I am myself a Soros Professor), but the donations of the Soros Foundation to Russian scientists (US$65 million since 1994) total only just over half as much as the grants from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research ($122 million).

Meanwhile, the Russian Academy of Sciences received from the federal budget in 1996 (for one year) about $350 million, far less than is needed.