The Seeds of Disengagement

The air of bonhomie that pervaded the Grand Ballroom far transcended anything normally inspired by French champagne and Russian caviar. There in France's Moscow embassy stood Charles de Gaulle, smiling benignly and shaking hands. And there stood Premier Aleksei Kosygin, his ample, blonde wife Klavdia on his arm. Mme. Kosygin pointed at her wryly grinning husband and cracked to De Gaulle: 'This one must have given you plenty of headaches these past few days." "Not at all," responded le grand Charles gallantly. "It went well, very well." Then, while Mme. de Gaulle entertained the ladies, De Gaulle took Kosygin and Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev aside for an intimate chat. Western newsmen goggled at the sight of the burly Brezhnev locking De Gaulle in a bear hug while stressing an important point. "Eisenhower could have had this kind of reception," groused one American. "De Gaulle is just stealing Ike's show."

Sense of History. That he was, and with a Gallic vengeance. In Leningrad, De Gaulle attended Mass in the city's only remaining Catholic church, Notre Dame de Lourdes, and received Communion while 500 Leningrad Catholics sang in Latin. In impeccable Russian, he quoted Pushkin on Sankt-Peterburg: "So stand in glory, Peter's city, and stand as invincible as Russia." He plunged into the Leningrad crowds--estimated as high as 1,000,000--shaking hands and dragging a reluctant Kosygin behind him. He swept through the Hermitage, gazing judiciously at Rembrandts and Murillos but discreetly skipping the halls devoted to the Napoleonic wars. He visited the World War II monument at Piskarevskoe cemetery, where half a million victims of the 900-day Nazi siege of Leningrad lie buried ("This is the agenda of agony," said De Gaulle). He toured a huge turbine plant, and attended his third ballet in a week--without yawning.

In Kiev and Volgograd--formerly Stalingrad--the pace was as swift, the Russian phrases as fluent, and the overtones of history as frequent as they had been throughout the tour. Standing with Soviet Artillery Boss Marshal Nikolai Voronov on Mamaev Hill, where the Russians turned the tide at Stalingrad, De Gaulle peered through thick spectacles at the map of the battlefield. "Ask Voronov how he organized his artillery," De Gaulle asked the interpreter. After the reply, De Gaulle said approvingly: "You are a great artillerist." Still he refused to lay a wreath at the Stalingrad memorial. That recalled his comment to the Russians in 1944 when he viewed Stalingrad for the first time: "Un grand peuple les allenands." Everywhere he went, De Gaulle ate heartily, but at the Volgograd hydroelectric station he met his match. The station officials had prepared a 300-lb. sturgeon stuffed with caviar. De Gaulle eyed it skeptically and said: "There always has to be a victim." Only once did he lose patience with his hosts. In Kiev, being shown a bas-relief of "all the peoples of the world," De Gaulle snapped: "Good. Since everyone is there, we can go away." And he did.

Climate of Detente. Yet the climax of De Gaulle's grand tour proved an anticlimax for those who had anticipated--or feared--immediate and concrete results in the realm of East-West relations. Back in Moscow, De Gaulle met again with Brezhnev and Kosygin to prepare a 2,000-word "declaration of intent." Both sides held firm to their positions on German reunification, De Gaulle refusing to agree to East German recognition and the Russians remaining rigid in their support of the European status quo. Both sides concurred in their earlier demands for an end to all foreign intervention in Viet Nam, and agreed to work toward improving "a climate of detente between East and West." To that end, France and Russia will engage in "regular consultations"--period unspecified--and install a symbolic "white line" between their capitals like that already linking Washington and Moscow. In addition, they signed two accords calling for Franco-Russian cooperation in science and space, including an agreement for the Russians to launch a French satellite.

Left unsettled as De Gaulle flew back to Paris at week's end (replete with a small Siberian bear in his baggage) was the key question of a Soviet withdrawal of forces from East Germany. De Gaulle clearly would like to see such a first step toward the dissolution of that obstacle to a European settlement, and the U.S. has indicated that it would consider a quid pro quo pullback of its own. The matter may very well be on the agenda of the Warsaw Pact powers when they meet this week in the Rumanian capital of Bucharest. If so, the seeds of cold war disengagement that Charles de Gaulle planted along his triumphal 6,200-mile march through Russia may come to flower sooner than expected. But even if not, the De Gaulle visit will have served as a useful icebreaker in the process of preparing both East and West to abandon political positions too long frozen by shibboleths of the past.

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