Reagan to Meet Soviet Official
President Reagan will meet next week with Soviet Politburo member Vladimir V. Shcherbitsky, only the second member of the Soviet Union’s chief policy-making body to visit the United States in more than a decade, the White House said today.
The announcement said Shcherbitsky, first secretary of the Communist Party in the Ukraine, will meet with Reagan on Thursday.
Deputy Press Secretary Robert Sims said the session will be an opportunity for “a general exchange of views” and was not specifically pegged to the start of a new round of U.S.-Soviet arms talks in Geneva on March 12.
The Politburo member arrives in the United States this weekend as part of a delegation making a reciprocal visit following a trip to the Soviet Union by members of Congress last year.
Since the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev’s U.S. visit in 1973, the only other full member of the Politburo to visit has been Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko.
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