MOSCOW — The Soviet Union's leading conservative politician forcefully warned his nation Tuesday to use all its influence to oppose German reunification as a threat to Soviet security.
Yegor K. Ligachev, a senior member of the Communist Party's ruling Politburo, told a meeting of the party's Central Committee that the reunification of East and West Germany would create a threatening new economic and military power in the center of Europe and upset the postwar stability of the Continent.
"We must not overlook the approaching danger from Europe--namely the accelerated process of reunification of Germany and in practical terms the absorption of the Germany Democratic Republic," Ligachev told the Central Committee, according to the official Soviet news agency Tass.
"I think it is time to recognize this new danger and to speak out in full voice, the party and the people together."
Ligachev's firm stand in the course of the tumultuous debate over President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's proposed political reforms makes German reunification, quite unexpectedly, a major domestic issue here and is likely to inhibit Gorbachev's freedom of action on the question.
Soviet opposition to German reunification would not only make the process far more difficult, Western diplomats said, reacting to Ligachev's speech, but could quickly become a point of contention that would slow the improvement of East-West relations.
"Although we have started from entirely different positions, we have been coming together quickly and easily on ways to approach this question, though a solution is some distance away," a West European ambassador said Tuesday evening after reading Ligachev's speech to the closed-door party conference.
"Suddenly, we have not just a serious complication but a potential barrier in the process. . . . Real Soviet opposition, active Soviet opposition might be futile, but it would create very serious strains in European and East-West relations and could quickly become destabilizing," the diplomat said.
After declaring only two months ago that German reunification was "not on the agenda," Gorbachev had come to accept it as inevitable and had declared Moscow's support of Berlin's plan for a stage-by-stage drawing together of the two German states--although with warnings that the process must be carefully managed to ensure European stability.
