Determined Suitor

It was the most ebullient display of pressing the flesh since the days of Lyndon Johnson's breathless world tours At various times on Leonid Brezhnev's historic four-day visit to Bonn, television cameras caught the Soviet party chief kissing the hand of Chancellor Willy Brandt's wife Rut, bear-hugging the minister-president of North Rhine Westphalia, Heinz Kiihn, and talking to Brandt's diminutive foreign policy adviser Egon Bahr with both hands on his shoulders. Brezhnev grinned and waved at crowds so relentlessly, in fact, that his grandstanding seemed to nettle Brandt--no mean crowd pleaser himself when in the right mood. Once, as Brezhnev stopped to shake hands with photographers, the Chancellor muttered to an aide, "I guess I'll have to start playing this game too."

The Soviet leader matched his display of friendship with conciliatory words. In a remarkably gemuetlich television speech the night before he returned home, Brezhnev declared that the Soviet Union's goal was a "decisive turn" toward detente and peace "The Europe that has more than once been the hotbed of aggressive wars that have brought tremendous destruction and the death of millions of people," he said, "must become forever a thing of the past. We want a new Continent in its place--a Continent of peace, mutual trust and reciprocally advantageous cooperation among all countries."

Aid or Trade. Brezhnev's whirl wind courtship of Bonn had a plain purpose. He was after a massive influx of West German capital and technological assistance into the Soviet economy But Bonn was taken aback by the Soviet leader's unrealistic economic expecta tions and his tendency to wave away German political questions in order to dwell on industrial projects. German leaders said Brezhnev seemed to have little awareness of West Germany's role and economic obligations in the EEC. After a long session with West German businessmen, in which Brezhnev spoke lengthily about the opportunities for huge investments in the Soviet Union one Bonn official remarked "He was really talking about aid, not trade and paying off with raw materials." In Brezhnev's political discussions with Brandt, Berlin as always proved to be a problem. Halfway through the visit, the Russians refused to include any reference to Berlin in the joint communique. In response, Brandt refused to sign any statement at all. The Germans told their Russian counterparts that the use of Berlin as a pressure point was a central ingredient in the cold war and if the Soviets pursued that pattern there could be no detente. After several marathon sessions, the issue was finally resolved by an oblique reference to the "four-power agreement of Sept 3, 1971"--omitting the word Berlin but reinforcing the Berlin settlement by mentioning its date. That agreement, signed by the U.S., Britain, France and the Soviet Union, provides for free and unimpeded travel between West Berlin and West Germany, visits by West Berliners to East Germany and West German representation of West Berlin in international affairs.

On other matters, Brandt and Brezhnev signed two long-term economic and cultural pacts and a civil air agreement. They also agreed to press on with negotiations for a series of big West German industrial projects in the Soviet Union, including a $2.2 billion steel foundry. In turn, Brezhnev gave his blessing to the treaty Bonn is negotiating with Czechoslovakia, which will open the door to diplomatic relations with Prague, and later with Budapest and Sofia.

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