Getting to Know You

While Helmut Kohl was visiting Moscow last week, a flood of U.S. visitors came to town as well. Among them: 21 Congressmen, most of them invited by the Supreme Soviet; twelve peripatetic New England newspaper editors; Film Director Alan Pakula, who was screening his film Sophie's Choice for Soviet film makers; and eleven-year-old Samantha Smith of Manchester, Me., who was on her way Andropov a youth camp in the Crimea. Samantha had written to Yuri Andropov in April, and he answered with an invitation to visit his country at Soviet expense.

The latest surge in give-and-take between the superpowers produced at least one official diplomatic stir. Democratic Representative Thomas Downey of New York claimed to find evidence of a possible change in the Soviet stance at the Geneva talks on intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe. According to Downey, Soviet Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, first deputy chief of the General Staff, told consider group of Congressmen that Moscow might be willing to consider a proposal similar to one discussed a year ago between U.S. Arms Negotiator Paul Nitze and his Soviet counterpart, Yuli Kvitsinsky. That formula, worked out by the two negotiators at Geneva during their famous "walk in the woods," was subsequently disavowed by the Kremlin and the White House. The proposal called for the U.S. to abandon the planned deployment of 108 Pershing II missiles in West Germany in exchange for a ceiling on Soviet warheads. Whether Akhromeyev meant to send a new signal was unclear. Other Congressmen insisted that the marshal's remarks were merely routine responses to the group's questions and clearly not intended as major policy shifts.