Bavarian Leader to Visit Soviet Union
West German conservative leader Franz Josef Strauss will pay his first visit to the Soviet Union early next year and meet Kremlin leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the weekly magazine Spiegel said on Saturday.
In a report released ahead of publication it said that Strauss, who leads the right-wing Christian Social Union, had recently received an invitation which had been delivered by Moscow’s ambassador in Bonn, Yuli V. Kvitsinsky.
Strauss has cultivated close ties with Communist countries as ideologically diverse as Yugoslavia, Albania and China despite uncompromising right-wing views, and he has frequently pursued his own brand of foreign policy from the Bavarian state capital of Munich.
Strauss’ party is one of three represented in the Bonn coalition along with the Christian Democrats of Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the liberal Free Democrats of Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, a longtime foe of the Bavarian leader.
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