Macmillan Has Made Impression In Russia

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28833, 2 March 1959, Page 11

Macmillan Has Made Impression In Russia

(Rec. 10 pm.) KIEV, February 28. Mr Macmillan’s impact on the Russian people has probably been slight, although many millions have seen him on Moscow television. But to the educated and reflective Russian, his visit has introduced several fresh themes into the monotony of Soviet political life. Firmly, but courteously, Britain’s Prime Minster has driven home on every possible occasion the point that he and other Western statesmen stand for peaceful negotiation. The necessity for. negotiations to remove misunderstandng may be a political attitude in the West, but in the Soviet Union — to people conditioned to think that their leaders are the only pace-setters for peace—jit has struck an original note. Furthermore, Mr Macmillan has spoken with a calmness and firmness which must also strike many Russians, in contrast with the strident and dogmatic utterances of Soviet statesmen. The reaction of some. Russians will clearly be: “If Mr Macmillan also stands for peaceful negotiations—then why cannot we Start?" Another novelty about the visit is that the British leader has not come to get anything from the Soviet Union in a material sense. Muscovites, in particular, are accustomed to seeing many visiting statesmen in their country, especially from Asia and the Middle East, and, more recently, from Africa. These visits are nearly always marked by new economic agreements and followed by a flow of increasing quantities of Soviet aid. Mr Macmillan, on the contrary, has openly welcomed Soviet in-

dustrial competition with Britain. He has issued two reminders that Britain is also a powerful industrial country and that the Soviet Union does not possess a monopoly of welfare ambitions for the people.

In this connexion, he has mentioned publicly the British consortium which is supplying £12,500,000 worth of tyre-making equipment to a factory at Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine—a news item conspicuously absent from the Moscow press. He has also found an opportunity to remind Russians that coloured people from many parts of the world go to Britain as they do to the Soviet Union—to complete their education. Russians can hardly be blamed for imagining, that theirs is the only country in the world tvhich caters for the “exploited colonial” peoples since their newspaper reading is narrowly limited.

"Pravda” and "Izvestia” and other- leading Soviet newspapers have printed front-page photographs of Mr Macmillan and lys party in several Issues and have full texts of the speeches exchanged with Soviet

But to most of the 200 million Soviet citizens, he inevitably remains a shadowy figure. During yesterday’s tour of the agricultural exhibition in Kiev, two Russian women stood watching Mr Macmillan pass by. When a Russian, offical explained that he was the Brit-sh Prime Minister. they exploded with incredulous laughter. Finally they were convinced that it really was the Prime Mnister. Such a visitor to this country, coming without adequate public preparation or explanation of the motives for the visit, is indeed a strange figure to be seen walking through Russian suburbia.