Gorbachev Warns About U.S. Menace : Says Threat to Peace Continues Despite Defeat of Nazism

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, celebrating the victory over Nazi Germany 40 years ago, warned today that the United States represents “the forward edge of the war menace to mankind.”

Speaking to 6,000 veterans of World War II, Communist Party members and workers in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, Gorbachev paid tribute to the 20 million Soviets who died in the four-year “Great Patriotic War” with Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

“Almost every family lost one of its members, was seared by the war,” Gorbachev said. “The pain of loss, the sorrow for the fallen will never pass. But without their heroic life given to the motherland, there would be no victory.”

Despite the victory over Nazism, he said, the threat to peace continues.

U.S. ‘More Bellicose’

“American imperialism is at the forward edge of the war menace to mankind,” Gorbachev said. “The policy of the United States is growing ever more bellicose in character and has become a constant negative factor of international relations, a factor that cannot be ignored.”

His speech followed remarks in Strasbourg, France, by President Reagan, who warned of a Soviet military buildup. Reagan said the Soviets have a new weapon “clearly designed to strike first and thus disarm the adversary.”

Gorbachev said the United States is attempting “to undermine military-strategic balance, the basis of international security, in stepping up the arms race, especially the nuclear arms race, in dangerous plans for the militarization of space.”

West ‘Connived’ With Hitler

Even in the 1930s, he said, capitalist leaders connived with Hitler to destroy socialism. “Time will never absolve them of their responsibility for the catastrophe that could have been averted” had the Western Allies not been “blinded by their hatred for socialism,” he said.

Gorbachev received a prolonged, thundering round of applause when he praised the late--and now partially rehabilitated for victory celebrations--dictator Josef Stalin for his role in defeating Nazism.

“The gigantic work at the front and in the rear was guided by the party, its Central Committee, the State Defense Committee headed by General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party Josef Vissarionovich Stalin,” said Gorbachev, who appeared surprised by the duration of the applause.