Gorbachev arrives in Britain for talks

Press, 17 December 1984, Page 6

Gorbachev arrives in Britain for talks

NZPA-Reuter London A Soviet Politburo member, Mikhail Gorbachev, will meet the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, today for talks expected to deal in depth with prospects for improving East-West relations and achieving progress on arms control.

Mr Gorbachev, the second most powerful man in the Kremlin, declared on arrival in London at the week-end that he wanted a frank exchange on these issues and hoped his talks would help ease present strains in the international climate.

Two of Moscow’s top arms control experts have accompanied him on his visit and British officials said their presence made clear that Gorbachev would focus discussion on next month’s U.S.-Soviet arms control talks in Geneva.

N.A.T.O. diplomats in London said they believed he would try to encourage British misgivings about President Reagan’s “Star Wars” defence programme and urge Mrs Thatcher to put pressure on the U.S. to negotiate a comprehensive space weapons ban.

One of the two arms experts with him, Yevgeny Velikhov, has already warned that Moscow will inevitably develop its own response to any U.S. cosmic weapons system.

The Soviet Union has said it regards space weapons as the most pressing subject on the agenda for Geneva. The other senior expert with Mr Gorbachev is General Nikolai Chervov, who has a name for arguing Moscow’s case on arms issues with great skill at meetings with Western politicians. The two sides will spend several hours to-

gether at Chequers, Mrs Thatcher’s country residence outside London. In his brief arrival statement, Mr Gorbachev said he saw Soviet-British relations playing a key role in helping to bring about a wider improvement in the atmosphere between East and West.

On his first day in the British capital, the Politburo member, aged 54, the youngest member of the Soviet leadership, struck a very different image to that normally associated with his older colleagues.

Instead of the dour expression commonly adopted by Kremlin officials on public occasions, he stepped from his plane wreathed in smiles and said he had come to Britain “with good will and good intentions.” During an afternoon tour of places associated with Karl Marx and Vladimir

Lenin, the Soviet group was jeered by small knots of demonstrators protesting at Kremlin treatment of Ukrainians and Jews and the suppression of Poland’s Solidarity trade union.

But some of the most stringent security measures taken for a foreign visitor meant they were kept well away from Mr Gorbachev and he took no notice' of their placards and slogans.

Mr Gorbachev is the most senior Kremlin official to tour Britain since the Soviet Prime Minister, Alexei Kosygin, in 1967. During a week-long stay, Mr Gorbachev will visit companies which export to Moscow and pay a two-day visit to Scotland. Officials on both sides have said they hope the trip will end years of strain between London and Moscow and promote both political and trade links.