Europe: The Grandest Tour

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The balcony scene was played in a style that could only be described as Socialist surrealism. High above the cheering crowds and the nodding lindens of Gorky Street, Charles de Gaulle beamed magnificently from the very window in Moscow's massive, 19th century city hall where Lenin had exhorted the revolutionaries of 1919. "I am in finitely touched," De Gaulle began. "I bring you the greetings of the Parisian people and the people of France." Then, in perfectly polished Russian: "Long live Moscow! Long live Russia! Long live friendship between France and Russia!" At that cry, the lowering summer skies of Moscow burst with a Wagnerian thunderclap, lightning bolts crackled among the onion domes of the Kremlin, and the rain came streaming down.

The world has long suspected that Charles de Gaulle has a mystical control over the atmosphere, and last week's performance in Russia confirmed it—climatically and politically. From the moment his tricolored, twin-flagged (French and Soviet) Caravelle touched down at Moscow's Vnukovo Airport to his week's end sortie into Siberia, De Gaulle trailed sparks and portents like a comet. Europe and the world scrutinized each move, each speech, each communique and each symbol for an indication of De Gaulle's intentions.

What was he there for? To strike an other nonaggression pact with Russia like the one he signed in the wintry days of 1944? To conclude scientific agreements that would mount the French tricolor atop Soviet rockets and send them orbiting around the moon? Or was he there to speed the summer breakup of Europe's generation-old cold war?

Never had the Continent seen such bustle and palaver on questions that only a few months ago were sacrosanct. European diplomats from both sides of the erstwhile Iron Curtain were talking again. Russia concluded an $800 million wheat deal with Canada, the largest such sale in history. West German Social Democrats and East Ger man Communists were preparing for open debates. The Vatican announced the resumption of relations with Communist Yugoslavia, a hint of ties to other Red nations in the future.

What will come of it all? Europeans sense a major breakthrough in the offing, one that will eventually result in freer movement and new alignments, a Europe that despite proliferating nationalism could, for the first time since 1939, become one continent again. No one was ready to predict when the new Europe will come. Charles Andre Joseph Marie de Gaulle, 75, arriving in Moscow to rebuild the "proud tower" of European nationalism from the Atlantic to the Urals, was doing what he could to quicken the pace.