Kohl Backs Gorbachev Bid for Massive Foreign Aid

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev won a powerful vote of support on Friday from German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who declared that he backs Gorbachev’s upcoming proposal for massive new foreign aid and investment so fervently that he will try to persuade other Western leaders to underwrite planned economic reforms here.

Meeting less than two weeks before Gorbachev is scheduled to present his case in London to the heads of the seven leading industrial democracies, Kohl and Gorbachev emerged from five hours of talks outside the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, boasting of a new level of Soviet-German solidarity, notably on the economic front.

“I’ll try to bring my colleagues to understand that the success of reforms in the Soviet Union will be important not only for the Soviet people but for all of us in Europe,” Kohl said, “because their success will serve the cause of peace.”

Kohl, grateful for Gorbachev’s support last year for the unification of Germany, has become one of the Soviet president’s most active supporters in the West, and Germany has funneled more aid and loans into the ailing Soviet economy than any other country--more than $25 billion in the last two years.

Although German officials said Friday that they planned to be more reserved in their future assistance, Kohl maintains that he still believes that the West must support Gorbachev’s program wholeheartedly.

“The main thing I should emphasize is the solidarity of the two countries,” Gorbachev told a joint news conference. “I’m not talking now about credits, I’m not talking about trade, about projects--all that is there. All that flows from (the German) approach.”

Gorbachev has not disclosed details of his London proposal, but his emissaries are launched on a flurry of trips to Western capitals this week and next to lay the groundwork for his aid request, which might range from $15 billion to perhaps $30 billion annually for five or six years.

Grigory A. Yavlinsky, author of a radical new reform plan that Gorbachev appears to favor, is traveling from London to Paris, Bonn and Rome, while Yevgeny M. Primakov, Gorbachev’s chief foreign policy adviser, has gone to Japan. Leonid I. Abalkin, a leading Soviet economist, left Friday for London on a similar mission.

Gorbachev “is giving Western leaders a better idea of what he plans to put on the table so that they can react substantively to it right away,” a German diplomat said here Friday.

The dangers that the Soviet Union faces were dramatized by the growing conflict in Yugoslavia, Gorbachev said in response to a reporter’s question at the news conference.

The Yugoslav conflict, Gorbachev said, should serve as a warning to the Soviet Union--and its neighbors--of the dangers of rampant nationalism amid severe economic problems and of the threat that the breakup of the Soviet Union would pose for all Europe.

“That things have become so acute for Yugoslavia, for Europe, for all of us, is a lesson for all the people of the Soviet Union, and it’s a warning,” he said.

In view of the centuries-long mixing of peoples that coalesced into the modern Soviet Union, Gorbachev added, “I came to the conclusion that we cannot split up. It is too enormous a risk with unpredictably grave consequences.”

Declaring that he would work for renewal of the Soviet Union as a true federation, Gorbachev said, “We must take the path of reform and the path of integration, not disintegration. I will not back down from this position under any pressure.”

In one of his quick bursts of anger, the Soviet president lashed out at protesters who shouted for Ukrainian independence when he and Kohl stopped for a quick walkabout in Kiev. Gorbachev accused them of trying to push separatism despite referendum results showing that more than 70% of Ukrainians support remaining in the union.

About 200 demonstrators waving blue and yellow Ukrainian flags, some holding anti-Gorbachev and anti-Soviet posters, protested at Kiev’s Borispol Airport when the Soviet president arrived, and a similar crowd gathered along its main thoroughfare, Khreshchatik Street, as the official motorcade passed.

“Gorbachev chose to meet Kohl in Kiev to show that he is master of the Ukraine,” Lilia Goncharova, a member of the radical Ukrainian Republican Party, said at the airport. “We came to protest against the signing of the Union Treaty, which would just be another yoke on the neck of the Ukrainian people.”

At the same time that he is campaigning abroad for economic support, Gorbachev is pushing hard for nine of the 15 current Soviet republics to get together and sign a revamped agreement, known as the Union Treaty, that would share out power from the center to the republics but keep them glued strongly together.

But Gorbachev has run into increasing resistance from the Ukraine. The Ukrainian Parliament decided last week not to even discuss the Union Treaty until this fall, and local observers now predict that the Ukrainian leadership will not be ready to sign until winter--if at all.

During their talks in a modern, three-story villa set among decidedly un-Soviet manicured lawns rolling down to a 70-yard-long pool with a spouting fountain, Kohl and Gorbachev covered the gamut of international and bilateral issues, they said.

The topics included the still prickly question of the withdrawal of 380,000 Soviet troops from eastern Germany, the territory of the old German Democratic Republic. Soviet military leaders have complained that the logistics of bringing so many men back to the country by 1994 make the task nearly impossible.

Gorbachev said that he understands that the issue is ticklish, but added only that he and Kohl decided to solve the problem jointly. “It is not a simple problem, both economically and in human terms,” he said.