Berliners to Feed Soviets : Cold War Reserves to Be Sent

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev today pronounced himself and other Communists “guilty before the working class” and promised immediate steps to improve food supplies.

The Soviet president will get substantial help from Germany in that effort. More than 40 years after Moscow tried to starve West Berlin into submission, Germany said today it will help ward off hunger in the Soviet Union by donating huge food reserves built up because of the infamous blockade.

Gorbachev said he had concluded agreements for the republics of Estonia, Kazakhstan and the Ukraine to send dairy products to Moscow and Leningrad, where milk is hard to find in stores. Food shortages have caused a public outcry.

He also said powdered milk will be taken out of storage and distributed to the people.

In Bonn, Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s top foreign policy adviser, Horst Teltschik, said Germany will give the Soviets the so-called Berlin reserves, replenished over the years in case of another blockade.

Those reserves include, among other items, 66,000 tons of rye, 26,000 tons of canned meat and 7,500 tons of butter.

Berlin officials, who urged Bonn to donate the food, estimated that it could feed 10 million Soviets for one month.

A huge U.S.-led airlift broke the 1948-49 Soviet blockade, aimed at driving the Western powers out of Berlin.

A daily airlift of supplies and tens of thousands of food packages sent by CARE, the international relief organization, will also aid the crippled Communist nation as part of a large-scale assistance program.

Germans are worried, however, that their donations could wind up in the Soviet Union’s growing black market. “We are supervising things ourselves,” said Klaus Noeldner, head of the German branch of CARE.

Gorbachev, in a wide-ranging, hourlong speech before a conference of the Moscow City Communist Party organization, also reiterated his determination to hold the Soviet Union together.

Standing on a podium with an 8-foot-tall bust of Lenin, Gorbachev told the nearly 1,000 conference delegates that he realized the country’s food and ethnic problems were intensifying and he urged the party to keep the common man in mind.

“We are guilty before the working class, I think, all of us, and me personally,” the 59-year-old president and Communist Party general secretary told the audience.

A Soviet government spokesman said today Gorbachev will go to the troubled southwestern republic of Moldova (the former Moldavia) on Friday in an effort to calm ethnic tensions that have split the republic and led to violent clashes.

Gorbachev will go to the Moldovan capital of Kishinev for a 24-hour visit and is also considering a visit to the Russian-speaking city of Tiraspol, Gorbachev spokesman Sergei Grigoriev said.

Russians and Ukrainians in the Dniester region of eastern Moldova and Turkic-speaking Gagauzis in the south declared separate autonomous regions earlier this year because of fears that minority rights will be trampled under Moldovan nationalism and the majority’s desire to unite with Romania.