CALLS TO WESTERN EUROPE 305She started with panache. She dressed glamorously in fur hat and coat.
She visited the Russian Orthodox Church monastery at Zagorsk out-
side the capital. She joined an ordinary Russian family in their
apartment – the British embassy took care to ensure that the family
were not KGB operatives. Her chance to make a public impact came
when she gave a live TV interview to three senior journalists. Their
professional experience counted for nothing as she tossed their ques-
tions back at them and expounded the virtues of an open society and
a market economy. She, not they, set the agenda. They were accus-
tomed to compliance from the female sex. They had never encountered
such an Amazon. The TV audience loved how she punctured the
balloon of official Soviet complacency. Nobody had ever been allowed
to use the Soviet media to issue so direct a challenge to the credo of
Marxism-Leninism. Her forthrightness and charm won friends for the
West in the USSR. She expressed her thoughts ‘beautifully’, purring
like a cat as it approaches a huddle of rabbits.^22
She behaved no differently in her private sessions with Gorbachëv,
as Ambassador Cartledge recalled:
There can never have been a case where two heads of government
so radiated a kind of chemistry between them. You could see the
sparks flying off. They both liked talking. They both liked the
sound of their own voices. They were both very difficult to inter-
rupt. But they both managed to interrupt each other, and they had
met their match.^23Knowledge of their personal rapport somehow filtered through to the
Soviet public, and there was a profusion of risqué jokes about it.^24
Gorbachëv looked on the bright side. As he admitted to his politi-
cal confidants, the Prime Minister was hard to categorize: ‘Madame is
more cunning, Mitterrand is dirtier.’ He had said that Britain’s insist-
ence on keeping its nuclear weapons merely discredited her around
the world and indirectly encouraged other states to develop them. She
replied that once invented, such weaponry could not be got rid of.
They were talking at cross purposes, as when Gorbachëv asked her
what she had done to help the process of nuclear disarmament. On
1 April she flew on to Georgia, where she spent a day in Tbilisi. Deputy
Foreign Affairs Minister Kovalëv reported that when she mingled with
the crowds, people began to shout: ‘Peace, peace!’ Gorbachëv acknowl-
edged that her performance in the USSR had gained many admirers,
especially among Soviet women. But he felt confident that she was