East Bloc Cancels Summit; Chernenko Reportedly Ill

A Warsaw Pact summit meeting was postponed at the 11th hour Monday, raising new questions about the fragile health of Soviet President Konstantin U. Chernenko.

Although no announcement had been made on his role, the 73-year-old Chernenko had been expected to attend the meeting, scheduled for this week in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia.

The Soviet leader, who reportedly suffers from the lung disease emphysema, has not been seen in public since a Dec. 27 ceremony at the Kremlin. Western news agencies said Monday, quoting unidentified Soviet sources, that Chernenko had fallen ill.

An announcement carried Monday by Tass, the official Soviet news agency, said only that the session of the Warsaw Pact’s top-level Political Consultative Committee had been postponed indefinitely.

Some Western diplomats said Chernenko’s health was the most probable cause for the unexpected delay in the conference of the Soviet Union and its East European allies.

The political consultative group includes the Communist Party leaders and prime ministers of the seven-nation pact. Foreign ministers and defense ministers also were expected to attend.

They presumably would have discussed the Soviet-American meeting at Geneva last week that led to agreement on new nuclear arms control negotiations. In addition, they were expected to approve a 10-year extension of the Warsaw Treaty, their mutual defense pact that is scheduled to expire in May.

In Sofia, the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry had set up a special press center at a hotel to provide accreditation for dozens of foreign journalists who arrived Monday to cover the summit. Ministry officials refused to discuss the postponement or to say when the summit might take place.

Chernenko, who skipped the Red Square funeral for Defense Minister Dmitri F. Ustinov in subzero weather last Dec. 24, had appeared in an honor guard at the bier three days earlier. After taking part in a five-minute Kremlin ceremony to present awards to Soviet writers on Dec. 27, he has been out of sight.

The Soviet leader, who took office almost a year ago after the death of Yuri V. Andropov, also was not seen in public for seven weeks last summer.

Bulgarian officials reportedly were eager for Chernenko to visit their country, which has not played host to a Soviet chief of state since 1979.

Led by the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact includes Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. Its political committee last met in June, 1983, in Prague, Czechoslovakia.