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IN CONFIDENCE
4. Dr McLaren briefly described her visits to Eastern Europe and
the Ukraine during the past year. She observed that the inability of our Embassy in Kiev to issue visas was an obstacle
to exchanges of scientists. She was pleased that the new science academies in the Czech Republic and Slovakia seemed well disposed
to each other. They had agreed, amicably, that the Post-doctoral Fellowships would be distributed in a 2 (Czech): 1(Slovak) ratio.
There was even a prospect that the two academies might have a
single foreign relations department which would enable the
Royal Society to do business with one contact point.
5.
Mr Lennox-Boyd said that he was pleased to be participating
again at a meeting which he had greatly enjoyed twice previously.
He congratulated Sir Michael Atiyah and Dr McLaren on their
recent honours. He was pleased to hear that the Royal Society
was involved in attempting to stem the brain-drain from the FSU. This was indeed a worthy objective. As the subscriptions to the
International Seismological Centre and to the Crystallographic
Database had been paid from Mr Bone's Programme Budget, he would
ask Mr Bone to make some comments on the FSU. Mr Bone said that
the Russian economy was in trouble, with hyper-inflation running
at 30-50% per month. No agreement with the IMF was likely soon.
Krasavchenko was not the right man to head the Central Bank. There had been some worrying personality changes especially the
loss of Gaidar. There were, however, some brighter spots, such
as grass-roots privatisation. The Russians had in Chubais a dynamic Minister for Privatisation. Given this picture, the decision of how much tangible support HMG should give to Russia
was bound to be a difficult one. It would be imprudent to pour British taxpayers' money into such a leaky bucket. Major support
must be provided via the Bretton Woods Institutions. But some money, export credit for example, was available direct from the
UK.
IN CONFIDENCE