De Gaulle At Mass In Russia

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31096, 27 June 1966, Page 13

De Gaulle At Mass In Russia

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright/ LENINGRAD, June 26.

President and Madame de Gaulle will break with the official programme of their State visit today to attend Sunday mass in Leningrad’s only Roman Catholic Church open for worship—the Church of the Holy Virgin Mary of Loudres. They will join a few hundred of Leningrad’s Roman Catholic worshippers, in the little, red granite-faced, neoRomanesque church. In the afternoon the general will pay tribute to Leningrad’s war dead at Piskarevskoye cemetery. Altogether, 900,000 people are thought to have died in the city’s 900-day blockade by German troops. More than 600,000 died of hunger, but some died of cold or were killed by military action. Mass Graves

Most of them are buried in mass graves, blasted out of the frozen winter soil during the war, at Piskarevo, on the city’s north-eastern outskirts.

The graves bear no inscription beyond the date: 1941, 1942, 1943. 1944 or 1945—engraved on little stones placed on neatly kept lawns. President de Gaulle yesterday became the first Westerner to visit a Soviet space station. He saw the launching of an unmanned Cosmos satellite. The satellite, the 122nd in the four-year Cosmos research series, was announced briefly with no mention of the general’s visit to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in the steppes of Central Kazakhstan.

But its angle of inclination to the equator, 65 degrees, made it virtually certain it was launched from there, and that the general watched as its powerful booster rockets thrust it into a circular orbit. President de Gaulle and a small group of top aides flew to Baikonur from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, where he had spent two nights on his seven-day tour of Soviet provincial cities.

His trip to Baikonur was a token of the Kremlin’s eagerness to accord special honour to the French visitor. Set in the midst of the treeless steppes of Central Kazakhstan, where 50 years

ago only nomadic Kazakh herdsmen with their camels, goats and sheep ■ ventured, Baikonur is now the nervecentre of Russia’s manned space programme. From seemingly endless steppe with nothing but a few scattered herdsmen’s round felt-covered yurts (tents), it has grown into the focal point of some of man’s most spectacular achievements. The cosmodrome is barred

even to most Soviet journalists and the last manned shot, in March 1965, was the first time Russian reporters were permitted to witness preparations for the launch. Russia and France plan to sign a space co-operation agreement next Thursday which might provide for Soviet rockets to launch French satellites. If so, Baikonur could well be the base for their launching.