Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [38]
I took the opportunity to discuss some other, equally important, matters en route to Tokyo. We had sought and were given permission from the Soviet Union to shorten the route to Japan by overflying Russia. In Moscow the plane landed to refuel and I was met by the Soviet Prime Minister, Alexei Kosygin, who broke off a meeting of communist prime ministers to come to the airport. To my surprise, an unscheduled dinner was laid out in the airport lounge. Hospitality in the Soviet Union was always generous for important visitors: there were two worlds, one for foreign dignitaries and the party élite, with luxuries of all kinds, and another for the ordinary people, with only the plainest of goods, and not many of them.
The motive for the Soviets’ special attention was soon clear. They wanted to know more about the ‘Iron Lady’ — as their official news agency, Tass, had christened me following a speech I made in 1976 while Leader of the Opposition.
In East-West relations this was the lull before a huge political storm. Under the guise of détente the Soviets and their communist surrogates had pursued for some years a policy of covert aggression, while the West had let slip its defences. At Tokyo I was to find further evidence of the Carter Administration’s overconfidence in the goodwill of the Soviet Union. The second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) had been signed only days before. There was even talk of a SALT III. But the mood was about to change, for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was less than six months away.
Although we discussed defence, the most sensitive matter I raised with Mr Kosygin was the plight of the ‘boat people’, who were leaving Vietnam in their hundreds of thousands. They were the victims of appalling persecution, terrible enough to make them sell all their belongings, leave their homes and risk their lives sailing in overcrowded and dangerous ships, with no certainty of escape. A large merchant fleet sailed under the British flag and naturally our ships were picking up these tragic refugees from communism to save them from the risk of shipwreck and piracy. The rule of the sea is that survivors from shipwreck can be landed at the next port of call. But it often happened that the next port of call — in Singapore, Malaysia or Taiwan — refused to take them unless we agreed that they should be allowed to come on to Britain. At home we were still experiencing all the social and economic pressures of past mass immigration and consequently this was something we were most reluctant to agree. At Taiwan, although they would be given medical attention and food on the ship, they were not being allowed to land. The boat people themselves refused to land in Canton: they had had enough of communism. So this meant that Hong Kong became their favoured immediate destination, from where they hoped to go on to the United States or elsewhere in the West. The communists, of course, knew perfectly well that this flood of emigration was a costly embarrassment to the West and doubtless they hoped it might destabilize other countries in the region.
I put it to Mr Kosygin that Vietnam was a communist country and a close ally of the Soviet Union, and that he had considerable influence there. What was happening was a disgrace not only to the regime in Vietnam, but to communism as a whole. Could he do nothing to stop it? His words were translated to me: ‘W-e-ll’, he said (or the Russian equivalent), ‘they are all drug-takers or criminals …’ He got no further. ‘What?’, I asked. ‘One million of them? Is communism so bad that a million have to take drugs or steal to live?’ He immediately dropped the subject. But the point had been made and fully understood,