IN his review of Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin by Alexandra Richie (April 30), Frank McLynn attacks the book with great aggression, holding, it would appear, its greatest sin to be not treating Karl Marx as a deity or at least an icon.

Perhaps the reviewer has been asleep for the last 10 to 15 years and not noticed that Marxism has been exposed as entirely fraudulent teaching, or that each country without exception, and these numbered more than 30, where the regimes took Marxism as a guide to action, suffered a total fiasco with colossal losses of human life.

In keeping with Frank McLynn's ''academic approach'' he is surprised by Alexandra Richie's not equating the participants of the exchange of Greville Wynne and Gordon Lonsdale, calling the first a British citizen and the second a KGB agent. He considers that both should be called spies and no more.

Yet she is absolutely correct: Greville Wynne was a private businessman who agreed to the British government's request to perform one individual operation on East European territory. Gordon Lonsdale, on the other hand, was a professional intelligence officer, a colonel of the KGB who devoted his career to espionage against Britain.

It is not hard to see where it is that Frank McLynn's heart lies.

Oleg Gordievsky,