Unsmiling Comrade

The Premier of Soviet Russia made the required pilgrimage this week to London's Highgate cemetery to pay homage at the grave of Karl Marx, the poverty-stricken, antisocial journalist who started it all. But Marx would not have approved of the company that Aleksei Nikolaevich Kosygin kept on his eight-day visit to Britain: it was far too typical of what he denounced as "capital enthroned."

There were talks of substance, but the substance was far overshadowed by the socializing. Kosygin, who was accompanied by his daughter, Mrs. Liudmila Gvishiani, 38, and his 19-yearold grandson Aleksei, took the entire first floor at Claridge's, from whose haughty marquee flew the hammer and sickle. He dined at 10 Downing Street with Prime Minister Wilson, who welcomed him as "an old friend, a statesman I personally know to be cool and wise in his judgment, warm in his heart." He met with Britain's top capitalists at the Hyde Park Hotel, mingled with the likes of Mod Designer Mary Quant, Actress Mary Ure and the dip set at Lancaster House, and addressed scarlet robed sheriffs and aldermen, ecclesiastics and industrialists at the Guildhall. Ahead in Fashion. Kosygin dined on pheasant laid out on Sevres china at dinner for 56 in Buckingham Palace, where everyone, including Queen Elizabeth, came in informal clothes in deference to the Soviet Premier's liking for the common touch. Kosygin addressed both Houses of Parliament in the opulently decorated Royal Gallery of the Lords, proposing a "treaty of friendship, cooperation and nonaggression" with Britain. On a side trip to Scotland, he saw a soccer match at Kilmarnock, dined at the stylish golf resort of Troon. Returning to London, he was scheduled to meet the Tory shadow Cabinet of Ted Heath in that archbastion of the capitalist system, the Carlton Club.

Like Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny in Italy a week earlier, Kosygin got a friendly welcome in Britain--though anti-Communist demonstrators dogged his path. When he could get away from the high and mighty, Kosygin got to shake a few plebeian hands, sometimes in response to cries of: "Give us a shake, mate." At one point a pretty 18-year-old girl popped past police escorts, greeted him with: "Hello, my old fruit."* Replied Kosygin gravely: "You are the young Britain I want to meet. I wish you peace and prosperity."

Friendly Welcome. Despite all this amiability, Kosygin went right on to say some unpleasant things about Britain's major allies. At the Guildhall luncheon, as Prime Minister Harold Wilson sat grim-lipped, Kosygin made a ritualistic attack on the U.S. as "the only cause of the war in Viet Nam." He discouraged U.S. hopes for an accord on halting the anti-missile missile race. He also launched a rude and ill-advised diatribe against the new Bonn government of Kurt Kiesinger, warning that Nazism and militarism were on the rise in West Germany. In 15 hours of private talks, Kosygin and Wilson covered the gamut of the world's problems, but there was no sign that they agreed on any of them.

Wilson wanted most of all to talk about trade. Britain buys about $200 million more from the Russians each year than it sells to them, and Wilson wanted to discuss ways to push more British refrigerators, clothing and electronic equipment in the Soviet Union. Kosygin proposed instead that the two countries coordinate their economies, fitting Britain, in effect, into the Soviet Union's economic planning. To both Wilson and British industrialists, Kosygin stressed that Soviet science could help Britain and the rest of Western Europe close the bothersome technology gap with the U.S.

Throughout speeches, banquets and tours, Kosygin retained his dour, computerlike demeanor. So unfailingly glum was his face that British photographers called "Cheer up!" in the vain hope of getting him to smile. At one luncheon, Britain's irrepressible Foreign Secretary George Brown leaned over to Kosygin and told him: "That peach you are eating is from American Georgia, not Soviet Georgia. By eating it, you are supporting the U.S. war in Viet Nam." Startled when the interpreter told him what Brown had said, Kosygin replied: "I can eat anything." George had the last word. Said he: "What kind of morality is that?"

*Which in British slang means roughly "old boy" and lacks the special connotation that the word has in American idiom.

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