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Soon President and Potentate strode from the station to review the Red troops. First the infantry and then the cavalry wheeled past. Meanwhile Her Majesty chatted with the Soviet's most famed female diplomat, Mme. Alexandra M. Kollontai, who had come from her post as Ministress to Norway especially to attend Queen Thuraya. Their conversation was presumably "advanced," for Mme. Kollontai is an avowed, die-hard exponent of free love, while Her Majesty, a tireless educator, is easily the most emancipated woman in backward Afghanistan. Both these sagacious ladies paid small heed to President Kalinin, whom ignorant peasants affectionately call the "Little Father," as they once did the Tsar. The Queen and the Ministress know that Comrade Kalinin is but a willing and placid figurehead, who serves to mask the activities of seclusive Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin. Characteristically the seldom-or-never-seen Dictator kept himself within the thick-walled Kremlin, last week, while the Royal Afghans were lodged just outside, in a sumptuous marble palace overlooking the Moskva River. Soviet press censors would take care that no word of secret conferences between King and Dictator should leak out until favorable results could be reported.
Banquets & Portents. To provide festivity on the night of Their Majesties' arrival a banquet and a ball were given, with all Russians present attired, according to sex, in double-breasted serge suits, or the plainest of frocks. The setting, a refurbished and resplendent palace, seemed like a coronet of gold and platinum studded with pebbles. The banquet menu, however, was less incongruous. Delicate appetizers, including three kinds of caviar, were followed by an exquisite bisque, then many a fish, roast game in abundance, a fragile salad, and fruits from every quarter of the Soviet Union, some fresh and some in syrup. Because the Afghans are Moslems and accordingly teetotalers, however, there was not served that profusion of vintage wines which enlivens typical Soviet banquets.
Subsequent diversions for Their Majesties included a horse race at the Moscow Hippodrome and a gala performance at the onetime Imperial Opera of the Communist Ballet Red Poppy, the theme of which is the present Chinese civil war (see China).
Meanwhile the Soviet press was vigorously astir with discussion of the significance of the Afghan visitation. Since the Russian proletariat has been taught to hate and despise "kings" and "emperors," His Majesty was ambiguously referred to in the press, by order of the Soviet censor, as a "Padisha." Curiously enough, however, the verbal use of "Majesty" was not barred, because research had established that the late Nikolai Lenin, founder of the Soviet State, whose every act and word has become a sanctified example, once addressed to the "Padisha of Afghanistan" a letter which began, "Your Majesty. . . ."