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'Repentence' Dear editor, I recently saw "Repentence," a film by a Georgian student of the early Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. The film is a powerful, bitter, intransigent excoriation of Stalin and Stalinism's monstrous evil ("unforgiveable crimes," as Gorbachev said in his 70th-anniversary speech).

The film is poetic/metaphorical and all the more powerful for the artistry of its method. It even deals with the Moscow Trials, the false confessions, and the criminal greed of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

To see the Stalinists wrapped in the good values of socialism, culture, and "the will of the people," mouthing the jewels of humanism (such as a Shakespeare sonnet) for their most evil purposes is an experience in verification that goes deeper than anything I've ever felt in politics/culture.

The reviews say that the film is playing to standing-room-only houses in the Soviet Union, and We welcome letters from our readers.

Please keep them brief.

Where necessary, they will be abridged. one can see why. This film can't really be discussed without using the concepts of Leon Trotsky who "wrote the book" on these matters and provided the vocabulary and analysis to define the Stalinist bureaucracy.

"Repentence" doesn't lay out a policy for future repair of the rotted superstructure. But it does define the problem and open a door which, in my opinion, can never close again.

Israel Dear editor, Israel's air force is rated the third most powerful in the world. Financing doesn't appear to be much of a problem. As a rule, about half of U.S. military sales to Israel are an outright gift.

From 1974 to early 1978, some $3 billion out of $5.5. billion in military assistance was donated completely free. From 1946 to 1983, the U.S. government provided more than $27 billion in military and economic aid to Israel.

Why such generosity? The U.S. relies on Israel to help maintain control over the region in order to exploit its raw materials and preserve it as a captive market for American manufactured goods. Nor will this objective change-regardless of J. Morgan, Santa Barbara, Calif. who is elected president this year.

Victor Saxe, San Francisco, Calif.

Pap tests

Dear editor, Several women in the United States have died of cervical cancer during the last few years after having received "negative" diagnoses through routine PAP-smear tests. I recently heard a radio report by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which said that as many as one in four PAP tests in this country may be inaccurate.

More and more, PAP tests are performed by profit-oriented "factories," often by mail order. Technicians are generally paid according to a piece rate-about $.80 per test. This has led to increasingly shoddy work, as the laboratory workers struggle to meet deadlines and specified workloads.

"When you do not see the science. In these so-called PAP mills and PAP factories, there is a compulsion to get the work out and to do it rapidly."

One laboratory was recently "taken over by venture capitalists," a technician stated on the radio. The workers now process about 160 PAP smears a day— twice the recommended quantity. The owners "know nothing about what we do," the technician complained. "They only know the 'bottom line.""

Misha Butler, San Francisco, Calif.

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victim," a doctor said of the mail- order labs, "there is no con-