The BBC originally wanted him to do a programme on India but the Indian high commission in London refused him a visa. When he visited Russia, Powell went to the graves of 600,000 people who died during the siege of Leningrad and saying that he could not believe a people who had suffered so much would willingly start another war. He also went to a veterans' parade (wearing his own medals) and talked with Russian soldiers with the aid of an interpreter. However, the programme was criticised by those who believed that Powell had dismissed the Soviet Union's threat to the West since 1945 and that he had been too impressed with Russia's sense of national identity. When German reunification was on the agenda in mid-1989, Powell said that the UK urgently needed to create an alliance with the Soviet Union in view of Germany's effect on the balance of power in Europe. After Thatcher's Bruges speech in September 1988 and her increasing hostility to a European currency in the last years of her premiership, Powell made many speeches publicly supporting her attitude to Europe. When Heath criticised Thatcher's speech in May 1989 Powell called him "the old virtuoso of the U-turn". When inflation crept up that year, he condemned the Chancellor Nigel Lawson's policy of printing money so sterling would shadow the German deutschmark and said that it was for the UK to join the European Monetary System. In early September 1989, a collection of Powell's speeches on Europe was published titled Enoch Powell on 1992 (1992 being the year set for the creation of the Single Market by the Single European Act of 1986). In a speech at Chatham House for the launch of the book on 6 September, he advised Thatcher to fight the next general election on a nationalist theme as many Eastern European nations previously under Russian rule were gaining their freedom. At the Conservative Party conference in October, he told a fringe meeting, "I find myself today less on the fringe of that party than I have done for 20 years". After Thatcher resisted further European integration at a meeting at Strasbourg in November Powell asked her parliamentary private secretary Mark Lennox-Boyd to pass to her "my respectful congratulations on her stand ... she both spoke for Britain and gave a lead to Europe—in the line of succession of Winston Churchill and William Pitt.