Thursday, 4 May

Dull

At 8.00 p.m., the former Aviation Minister of France, Pierre Cot, invited me to dinner. Recently he has inspected a lot of places in the Soviet Union, and his impressions are as follows:

1) The standard of living of the Soviet people is more advanced than he saw ten years and five years ago.

2) The factories that the Soviet Union relocated to Siberia and the Ural Mountains will be retained locally and absolutely will not be moved back. The workers will also stay there, so right now the Soviet Union has started to sort out the living places and workers’ accommodation, as well as other problems. It will bring new factories and new trained workers into the original and reclaimed areas. According to his own estimation, after this war, Soviet industrial development will not diminish, and it will increase by 20%.

3) Soviet industrial development lags far behind the Americans – almost by twenty-five years, and also about ten years behind western Europe.  Therefore, after the war the Soviet policy will be to try to maintain a stable period and strive hard for construction in order to catch up with the United States.

4) He talked to many Soviet people and thought that they admired the United States. Probably considering the characters of the Soviet people they are closest to the Americans in that they do not care about the past and envision the future. The Soviet people only focus on the immediate future. On this point, the French and Chinese have a big disadvantage.

5) The renovation works in the recovered areas are extremely rapid, and their organisation excellent.

After dinner we all went to the Mexican Ambassador Luis Quinranilla’s to have coffee. Suddenly the telephone rang. On answering the call, he insisted that there was no woman in the room and asked Garreau to verify. When Garreau received the call he deliberately spoke like a woman. The Mexican Ambassador became even more anxious, snatched back the phone and tried to explain. Ambassador Kerr, the Greek Ambassador and I all laughed. Ambassador Kerr said in particular that this was really too bad. Probably the caller was a Russian woman who had had relations with the Mexican Ambassador. But on such an occasion this sort of thing shouldn’t happen. Certainly, the Mexican Ambassador was wrong, but the woman was without shame. One should be very careful if falling in love with a Russian woman. Ambassador Kerr shook my hand and congratulated me on the Sino-British lend agreement, because he handled this matter when he was in Chongqing. After many difficulties, it is now done. I am happy about it.