Moscow Meeting START OF FRENCHRUSSIAN TALKS

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31092, 22 June 1966, Page 13

Moscow Meeting START OF FRENCHRUSSIAN TALKS

(N Z.P A. Reuter —Copyright? MOSCOW, June 21. President de Gaulle began momentous Kremlin talks today with Mr Leonid Brezhnev and other members of the Politburo.

Mr Brezhnev, who is general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, broke protocol rules by personally leading the high-level Soviet group at the first Kremlin session since the French leader arrived yesterday on a 12-day visit.

Normally, talks with Western visitors are conducted by the Prime Minister, Mr Alexei Kosygin, or President Nikolai Podgorny. Today both took hack seats to Mr Brezhnev. The party leader took complete charge as soon as he strode in at the head of the Soviet delegation to greet the French leader in the Kremlin’s high-ceilinged Catherine Hall. The two leaders came in simultaneously through separate doors inlaid with gold and jewels, as cameramen j filmed the scene. Beautiful Hall Mr Brezhnev sat directly opposite General de Gaulle at a rectangular green-baize covered table. Above them hung three crystal and gold chandeliers.

, President Podgorny sat on I Mr Brezhnev’s left, facing Mr Maurice Couve de Murville, the French Foreign Minister. Mr Kosygin sat on the party leader’s right, across the table from Mr Philippe Baudet, the French Ambassador. The hall, used for State ceremonies in Tsarist times, j is one of the most beautiful ! in the great Kremlin palace. Its walls are covered with I yellow silk, set off by tall ■ green malachite pillars. ; ‘Harmful Spell’ ■ I General de Gaulle reminded ; i Mr Brezhnev that he had ' dined in the same room with i'Josef Stalin during a visit in • 1944. I “I was here, he was there,” I the French leader said as he | pointed to two chairs. In a Kremlin banquet speech last night, General de Gaulle set the tone for his talks by calling on Russia to : join France in breaking the ■ “harmful spell” of rigid confrontation between East and West. He said France wished to

associate herself more closely than ever before with the Soviet Union. At the banquet he said in a toast: “I raise this glass to Russia, with which France considers it her duty to associate herself more closely than ever before for the great value of peace.” French Role General de Gaulle said that France, in spite of her strivings for a "productive Europe,” in no way belittled “the essential role which the United States has to play in the pacification and transformation of the world.”

Nor was France ceasing to be “essentially a country of freedom and a Western nation,” he reminded his hosts. The first of three formal negotiating sessions, this morning’s meeting was expected to last about three hours. General de Gaulle was lunching privately before making a visit to the Moscow municipality this afternoon. There was no fixed agenda for today’s talks. General de Gaulle will have at least 20 hours of private talks with Mr Kosygin when the Prime Minister accompanies him on a 6000-mile provincial tour starting on Thursday.