Europe: The Grandest Tour

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Facts & Patents. Things went a bit better that evening at the Bolshoi, where De Gaulle received a standing ovation both from Muscovites and U.S. Ambassador Foy Kohler. The ballet was Romeo and Juliet, and De Gaulle, who was seated beside Klavdia Kosygin (Mme. de Gaulle's hostess throughout the week), loved every minute of it, especially the dueling scenes. He was also happy the next day, when the political talks took a more favorable turn. This time the main interlocutor was Economist Kosygin, who apologized for Soviet failure to deliver on 1964's Franco-Russian trade agreements. Said Kosygin: "You are too expensive." Still, he offered to speed up the retarded orders, and his underlings announced only a few hours later that the French firm Chausson had received a large contract for auto bodies. The delegations rapidly agreed to establish scientific and technical cooperation (exchange of scientists and patents) and to undertake joint unmanned space projects.

All went so smoothly on the economic and scientific front that there was time in that session to return to world-scale questions. On Viet Nam, De Gaulle and Brezhnev found it enough to agree that neither Red China nor the U.S. should ultimately win the war and occupy the country. Both concurred in their oft-stated demands for "respect for the 1954 Geneva Accords" and establishment of an independent Viet Nam, "sovereign and free of all foreign intervention." Brezhnev, softening from his rigid position of the previous day, proposed another session on politics at the end of De Gaulle's twelve-day trip. He had, said the portly party boss, been thinking about De Gaulle's speech of the day before, and wanted to talk about Europe again.

With that, De Gaulle took off on a 6,200-mile swing through Russia that was less political than it was crowd pleasing. In Novosibirsk—"the Chicago of Siberia"—fully half of the city's 1,000,000 residents turned out to greet the French leader. Accompanied by Podgorny and Zorin, De Gaulle inspected power plants and electrical-equipment factories, then stalked through Akademgorodok, a seven-year-old academic city of 37,000, which gave him the opportunity to strike again on the anvil of Franco-Russian cultural rapprochement. "How can one forget," he said, "that the great academy I am visiting today is the successor of one founded by Peter the Great in 1725? Later, the same drive that inspired Czar Peter carried you to Siberia, to discover great riches: oil, gas, metals. And to construct new cities. Let Soviet and French science unite for the progress of man. as Russia and France unite for the peace of the world."

From Novosibirsk, De Gaulle flew south to Baikonur, the Soviet Union's main space center. No other Westerner had ever seen the Baikonur "cosmodrome," and the Russians topped that distinction by launching a satellite in De Gaulle's honor—probably, said wags, a polar-orbiting satellite aimed at spying on the U.S. From there, at week's end, De Gaulle flew on to Leningrad for tours of the Hermitage and the Petrodvorets palace—and more talks with Podgorny and Kosygin about the ultimate disposition of Europe.