France: A Lively Robot

Discussing economics with a visiting Charles de Gaulle in 1944, Joseph Stalin once pointed out a young aide with a crew cut and mournful mien, and said: “I don’t know anything. But this man—he is the whole plan.” When Aleksei Kosygin became Premier of the U.S.S.R. 20 years later, his rise was seen as the coming to power of a new breed of managerial robot. Last week Stalin’s glum young associate turned out to be a lively, even likable robot. In the second week of his official visit to France, Kosygin quipped and capered, and proved an engaging salesman.

To be sure, the son of a St. Petersburg lathe operator seemed no art lover, paused only briefly before Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in the Louvre. But he could not get enough answers when shown the fuselage of the British-French supersonic transport, Concorde, or a frog’s heart preserved—alive—in a Grenoble laboratory. Whether reviewing an honor guard of skiing policemen in the Alps or placing a paternal arm around a hesitant American correspondent, Kosygin, 62, was always a relaxed guest. “If we are all together, there will be no more wars,” he shouted to a mob of delighted workers at a factory near Lyon. When a Grenoble judge suggested a cultural exchange of jurists, he joshed: “The happiness of the world will be assured when all judges are unemployed.”

The proletarian prince was even more amiable when De Gaulle took him and his Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, hunting in what was once the preserve of royalty. For the occasion, Kosygin had brought along a turtleneck sweater, a quilted jacket and his own Belgian-made Herstal over-and-under shotgun. Gromyko cut a different figure: gun in hand he tramped through the fields in business suit, grey fedora and dark topcoat. Still, he proved a good shot. In any case, the forests of De Gaulle’s Rambouillet chateau are well stocked for just such occasions, and it was a lot like shooting birds in a barrel. Together, the twelve-man party liquidated 263 pheasants.

As if to thank his hosts, Kosygin went on French television with some smiles and pleasing words for the audience. “For the first time in history,” he said, “two great powers with different social systems, the Soviet Union and France, have decided to put their relations on a solid foundation.” De Gaulle was doubtless pleased at something else Kosygin predictably produced: a blast—though a perfunctory one—at U.S. “intervention” in Viet Nam. But while the two statesmen were in hearty agreement over events in far-off Asia, they reached a standoff on what is the great issue for Europeans. In their talks, Kosygin again forcibly urged the general to recognize the division of Germany, but De Gaulle would have none of it, and their final communique simply ignored the issue.