Soviets Warn Germanys to Move Slowly : Unification: Stay out of NATO, don’t ‘upset the balance’ in Europe, Moscow says.

The Soviet Union warned East Germany’s new leaders Monday to move slowly toward unification with West Germany and reiterated that a united Germany could not be a member of NATO.

But Western politicians greeted the conservative election victory in East Germany as a ringing call for rapid German unification, a triumph for West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and a resounding defeat for communism.

Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov told a Moscow news conference: “We respect the choice of (East Germans), but we also expect the new government in East Germany to respect its obligations and our interests. . . . Make haste slowly, this is our motto.”

Gerasimov reiterated the Soviet view that German membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization “would upset the balance of Europe.”

But the White House said the victory of a conservative coalition led by Christian Democrats closely allied with Kohl’s ruling party in Bonn bolsters the case for a united Germany in NATO.

“Our policy, clearly, is that a reunified Germany would be in NATO. Chancellor Kohl has indicated that,” Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said. “This victory . . . would seem to lend support for that direction as well.”

Britain’s Conservative prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, hailed the results of East Germany’s first free elections. “It is a great day for East Germany and for Europe,” she said.

Wladyslaw Klaczynski, spokesman for the Polish Foreign Ministry, said his nation is ready to start negotiating joint border treaties with East and West Germany and “prepare with them a treaty which will be signed as quickly as possible at the moment of the birth of united Germany.”

In France, President Francois Mitterrand also urged haste in signing a treaty to fix the future nation’s borders for all time.

Silence from Beijing suggested dismay among hard-line Communists. Newspapers in China, which crushed a pro-democracy movement last June, made no mention of the East German election.

Cries for caution came from allies and supporters of East Germany’s socialists and Communists, the big losers in the election, and from some neutral commentators.

Some said East Germans voted to cash in on West Germany’s economic success. They “voted with their stomachs,” said the French left-wing daily Liberation.

A leading politician from Romania, one of four other East European countries holding multi-party elections in the next few months, described the election result as a West German takeover.

“That was no election. It was a virtual takeover by Germany Inc.,” Silviu Brucan, Romania’s foreign policy-maker, said in Vienna.

Gerasimov, too, voiced criticism of the substantial part West German politicians played in the East German election campaign.