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Next stop was the state-run GUM department store, biggest in Moscow. Pat nibbled on a vanilla ice-cream cone, and bought scarves for "the girls." She had to keep calling for "my banker," an aide who bustled up with rubles. Asked how much she had spent, she replied with a laugh that she did not know. "Not much," offered Mrs. Gromyko, wife of the Soviet Foreign Minister. Pat walked across Red Square and posed for pictures in front of St. Basil's Cathedral. Asked if she had seen the President recently, she replied: "Listen, I haven't seen that guy. He called me up yesterday and said, I'm going to be late.' "
After the glitter, the ceremonies, the maneuvering and the hard work of a summit, there is usually some letdown, a return to a kind of normality. Both Nixon and Brezhnev have domestic matters to deal with. The President will find skeptics on the left pointing out that the Viet Nam War is still not over; skeptics on the right are already questioning the new amity with the Communists, including the SALT agreement and what it does to American security. But on balance, the summit can only be a vast political asset for Nixon.
Brezhnev's problems may be more complicated. He will be strengthened against the Kremlin hard-liners who oppose his policy of detente. Not wasting any time, he demoted Pyotr Shelest before the summit began. As the party chief of the Ukraine, Shelest had once crushed an apple in his hand to demonstrate how he thought Czechoslovakia should be treated. He is said to have consistently opposed any steps toward coming to terms with the U.S. and he reportedly urged military action to break the blockade of North Viet Nam. He opposed Brezhnev on domestic matters as well. But the hard-liners in foreign policy will not simply melt away, and they will continue to constitute a potential check on Brezhnev.
In domestic policy Brezhnev himself is a hardliner. He will probably still deal harshly with dissenters: on the eve of the summit, five Jewish leaders were arrested, and Writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was once again denounced as an "opponent of Soviet reality." Many Americans have long hoped that an opening to the West and a better life for the Soviet consumer would bring about a more liberal political climate in Russia. But detente with the West does not necessarily mean detente within Russia. In fact, in cooperating with the West, the Soviets will have to face the problem of how to keep ideological infections from seeping in along with Western technology and taste.