RUSSIA: The Visitor

• Share

RUSSIA The Visitor

Only 14 years before, Nazi troops were probing to within 20 miles of Moscow, and behind them half a million square miles of Russia lay charred. Only ten years before, a sullen shuffle of a defeated, captured Nazi army marched on dismal parade through Moscow's streets. And now, with a rattle of drums, a blare of horns and the clatter of a goose-stepping honor guard, the leader of the new Germany was received in Moscow.

There was no suggestion of the intimidated, the vanquished or the bidden about Konrad Adenauer's visit. The Germans traveled east with a showy, if not disdainful, display of self-reliance. A gleaming, 13-car train, a "chancellery on wheels," pulled in the day before carrying a huge entourage, with the Germans' own communications, their own police, Mercedes sedans, and huge stocks of their own food (sauerkraut, sausages, choice wines). Even the motorized gangway that pulled up to the door of Adenauer's Super Constellation had been shipped in ahead.

The Duelists. The first German Chancellor ever to visit Russia relieved this aura of bristly independence with a friendly smile as he stepped lightly down the gangway and grasped the warmly extended hand of Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin.

"May this be the beginning of ... normal good relations between Germany and the Soviet Union," said Adenauer to the beaming reception committee of high Soviet officials. But even before the spoken formalities and the strains of West Germany's Deutschland Lied were carried off by the brisk autumn wind, tough old

Konrad Adenauer got down to the business that had taken him into the camp of his antagonists. "This," he said with a point to his words, "is the first contact between representatives of the Soviet Union and the German people."

Thus the duel began, with Adenauer's calculated and contemptuous dismissal of the Communist regime of East Germany.

In the "chancellery on wheels," before the first session began, Adenauer counseled with his aides. They had few expectations. The fact of the Kremlin's invitation to Adenauer—the formal recognition of a man they had so long reviled as an enemy, of a regime they had refused to recognize—was in itself bigger than anything that the visit itself was likely to produce. The Russians wanted to talk about formal diplomatic and economic relations between Moscow and Bonn, and to consider Germany's reunification only at the price of West Germany's withdrawal from the Western alliance. Adenauer had already agreed with the U.S., Britain and France to refrain at Moscow from any dickering on such terms. Adenauer had a slight hope that the Russians, to encourage diplomatic relations, might be persuaded to return some of the Germans still imprisoned in Russia since World War II. Beyond that, what took place at Moscow hinged on the wary testing game that was about to be played, and on the unpredictable behavior of the Russians.

Fast & Frank. In the marbled, white-and-gold music room of Spiridonovka palace (once a Czarist millionaire's mansion), the antagonists faced off. Bulganin, flanked by Khrushchev and Molotov, sat with the morning sun at his back. Chancellor Adenauer, with Foreign Minister Brentano at his elbow, sat facing them.