"Mon Gaulliste"

As burly Sergei Vinogradov was quick to learn after he first arrived in Paris back in 1953, life can be lonely for the Soviet ambassador to a Western capital--even when that capital has a solid Communist minority, ranging from tough factory hands to the mandarins of the Left Bank. In 1953, Vinogradov got a deliberately perfunctory greeting from Foreign Minister Georges Bidault, and some newsmen even ungenerously commented on the new ambassador's baggy appearance. But soon Paris began to take a second look.

Dinner guests at the Soviet embassy spread the word that the cuisine and cellar were excellent. Mme. Vinogradov, an amateur painter herself, began encouraging young French artists to drop around, even abstractionists, whose decadent works would never find favor in Moscow. And soon columnists were speculating on which London tailor the ambassador might be patronizing.

What Comes Naturally. Vinogradov became a buddy of one of France's richest capitalists, Marcel Boussac, lunched with Novelist Franc,oise Sagan, shot pheasant on the great Alsace estate of Socialite Jean de Beaumont. Recently, watching him move familiarly among the swarms of film stars, writers, ministers, generals, and artists at the Soviet embassy, Millionaire Boussac archly remarked: "There goes France's most fashionable ambassador."

If Vinogradov's performance succeeds better in Paris than the quick-fading charm of his counterpart in Washington, "Smiling Mike" Menshikov, it is partly because Vinogradov is on excellent terms with President Charles de Gaulle. This goes back to 1944, when Vinogradov was ambassador in Ankara. There, one day, a representative of General Charles de Gaulle approached him and asked that Moscow recognize the French government in exile. Vinogradov not only passed on the request but urged Moscow to grant it. When De Gaulle visited Stalin a year later, it was Vinogradov who was specially recalled to make him feel at home.

"Khoroshy Chelovek." In the last five years of the Fourth Republic, while other diplomats in Paris tended to write off the Hermit of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, Vinogradov told his staff, "Some day he will be back." On eight different occasions, he sought out the general for private interviews, usually at the office De Gaulle inhabited on his weekly visits to Paris. Each time, Vinogradov noted the general's growing impatience with NATO and his obsession with the steady decline of French prestige. After De Gaulle was swept back into power, Vinogradov's own prestige soared. "Khoroshy chelovek [excellent fellow]" he would say when asked what he thought of the general, and at the Elysee Palace, De Gaulle began to refer to the Russian as "mon Gaulliste."

Last week, as evidence of his prestige, Vinogradov was guest of honor at the Anglo-American Press Association in Paris. He softly rejected De Gaulle's talk of conflict between "white" Russia and "the yellow masses of China": "we are not racists. As to troubles between the Soviet Union and China, I do not know of them. We are unanimous in ideology." He fended off hostile questions contrasting thaw diplomacy with Communism's world revolutionary ambitions ("Marx said: 'Workers of the world, unite!' As a Marxist, I agree. As a diplomat, it is not my role to engage in ideological struggles with you"). The Anglo-American Press Association gave him a standing ovation, and then Sergei Vinogradov was off, first to receive the title of "Grand Duke of the West" from the Beaujolais Winegrowers Association, and then to visit the estate of ex-Premier Edgar Faure for a day or two of pheasant shooting.

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