When the Communists came to power, they arrested a number of even those Westerners who had been sympathetic, forcing them to undergo thought reform and confess to having been spies.
The letter, purported to be from Grigori Zinoviev, president of the Comintern, the internal communist organisation, called on British communists to mobilise "sympathetic forces" in the Labour Party to support an Anglo-Soviet treaty (including a loan to the Bolshevik government) and to encourage "agitation-propaganda" in the armed forces.
A sympathetic air force captain, Jorge Silva, learned they were to be shot and took them to the stadium to spare them from death, he said in a television interview.
But this dramatic change to the contract, which has been swept into place with little care for the workforce who it affects or consultation with those people, all of whom are hard working people with families and mortgages is the final insult from an uncaring government who has taken advantage of a sympathetic work force for too long.
It was during peace negotiations led by Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, that opposition leaders insisted on a more sympathetic military force than their own country's army if they were to return from exile to join the new power-sharing government.
CLOSING IN -- With relentless bombing and the checkmate positioning of their military forces around Kandahar, the United States military and sympathetic Afghan forces continued to send the Taliban's besieged defenders the message that surrender is the only way out of an otherwise hopeless plight.
But don't expect me to remain sympathetic when forced to hear a one-sided conversation about boyfriend woes or prostate exams.
Of course there are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender fans of horror, a genre packed with alienated yet sympathetic figures forced to create strange, thrilling new lives outside mainstream society.
Some groups and political leaders may cast themselves as pro-Russian, yes, and the Russian intelligence agencies are stirring up trouble, trying to undercut European unity on Russian sanctions by encouraging sympathetic political forces.
Clegg, a prominent literary agent, has followed two gut-wrenching memoirs about his drug addiction, "Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man" and "Ninety Days," with a flawless book about flawed but utterly sympathetic people forced to cope with some of the worst psychic pain imaginable.
