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Differing Freedoms. Next night Malenkov and his henchmen took dinner with the foreigners at the British embassy, the first time such a thing has happened since Stalin dined with Churchill in wartime 1944. The cordial chitchat between the great men of both nations continued far into the night. "There were no sharp questions asked and no sharp remarks made," said one of the Britons after a five-hourlong heart-to-heart talk with the Russians. At one point in the evening, Attlee, Deputy Foreign Minister Vishinsky and Trade Minister Mikoyan explored the meaning of the word freedom. At last, through a bewildered interpreter, the three agreed that in the West it meant "freedom to choose"; in the Communist East it meant freedom "from having to choose."
Next day Dr. Summerskill poked through Moscow's maternity hospital and the new GUM department store, which she found "absolutely terrific." At Moscow's towering new university building, Nye Bevan asked the Russian provost if Communism was a compulsory course. It was. "Suppose," persisted Nye, "that I did not want to take Communism?" The provost smiled broadly. "You would take it anyway," he said.
At the end of two days of tours, tea parties, toasts and sights (which included the inside of the Kremlin and the tomb of Lenin and Stalin), the touring Laborites were ready to take off for their final destination: Red China. Of Moscow's Malenkov, Clement Attlee remarked with Orwellian crypticism: "He is the most equal of the equals." Nye Bevan was warmer in praise. The Soviet Premier, he said, was "a man with a warm sense of humor."
Some 40 hours later, after a brief stop in Outer Mongolia, the touring Britons arrived in Peking, to be welcomed by Premier Chou En-lai at a cocktail party for 400. At a lunch given by Chou next day, they happily munched on roots of the lotus flower. Perhaps they found time later to recall the Moscow memory of what New York Times Correspondent Harrison E. Salisbury cryptically described as "a mildly admonitory toast offered [late] in the proceedings by possibly the most senior Russian present."
This most senior Russian wished for better British-Chinese relations, but hoped no one had the idea of improving British-Chinese relations at the expense of Soviet-Chinese relations.