Ussr Foreign Aid

More than billions of dollars in low-interest loans, more than shipments of meat and grain, more than sales of advanced Western technology, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will be bidding today for a broad Western pledge of support that he can use to build critical momentum for his stalled program of economic reforms.

The Communist Party used KGB couriers to carry about $200 million in state funds to Communists in the United States, France, Israel and other countries over the last three decades, a prosecutor said Monday. About 98 foreign parties and organizations in 80 countries received financial aid from the Soviet Union on orders from the party's Central Committee, said Yevgeny Lisov, Russia's first deputy prosecutor general.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization warned the Soviet Union Monday that Western assistance may not be forthcoming if there is a return to iron rule. On the first day of a two-day meeting, NATO foreign ministers agreed that Western aid will depend on continued democratic and economic reforms and is not intended to prop up Gorbachev personally, alliance officials said. Soviet President Mikhail S.

The Bush Administration's call for an international conference on aiding the Commonwealth of Independent States--the supposed centerpiece of a more dynamic American approach to the crumbling Soviet Union--has failed to catch fire and could become a minor embarrassment, U.S. officials and foreign diplomats said Wednesday. Many of the allied governments that will be asked to attend have been polite but unenthusiastic. A few have been openly critical.

With shipments of foreign food beginning to arrive in the Soviet Union, the government on Friday assigned the KGB, the state security and intelligence agency, to guard the supplies and ensure their fair distribution. Planeloads of humanitarian assistance began to arrive in Moscow and Leningrad from Germany this week, and larger shipments are en route by train, ship and truck convoy in a growing effort to relieve the increasingly acute food shortages here.

President Bush's kinder, and more accommodating, style of personal diplomacy brought him no end of grief from critics in Congress and elsewhere during his first 18 months in the White House. But it is finally beginning to pay off in America's relations with its economic allies. That is the message emerging from the annual seven-nation economic summit conference that ended Wednesday: After 2 1/2 days of hard bargaining among the allied leaders, Bush achieved virtually all his goals.

The United States and its six major allies, challenged to shape a new economic order for the post-Cold War era during the economic summit that opens here today, moved toward a shaky compromise Sunday on the contentious issue of whether to provide massive aid to the Soviet Union. Although Secretary of State James A. Baker III reaffirmed Sunday that sizable U.S.

The Soviet Union and Germany, Europe's two biggest nations, Friday signed a 20-year general treaty reconciling their troubled past and pledging large-scale cooperation for the future. The leaders of both countries called it a cornerstone of a new era in their relations. "Today is a special day in the centuries-long history of our countries and, I believe, also in the history of Europe," Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said at the signing ceremony.

British Prime Minister John Major plans to convene a meeting soon of top officials of the Group of Seven major industrial democracies on aid for the Soviet Union, British officials said Friday. Major's office said the prime minister, current G-7 chairman, took the initiative Thursday, suggesting a meeting next week of the officials. A spokesman said replies from all the G-7 members are still awaited and a venue will be decided later.

THE PARTY. The national Supreme Soviet legislature banned all activity by the Communist Party, until last year the only legal political force in the land. The vote seems certain to mark the end of an era that began with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. THE REPUBLICS. Russia and the Ukraine, the two richest and most populous Soviet republics, announced formation of a temporary military and economic alliance that appears to leave the Kremlin out in the cold.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III called on Americans and their allies Thursday to join in a coordinated effort to help the newly independent Soviet republics become prosperous, Western-style democracies and announced that President Bush will summon foreign officials to Washington next month to launch the drive. In a major speech at Princeton University, Baker also cut the Bush Administration loose from its once-close tie to Soviet President Mikhail S.

U.N. Says East Bloc Marshall Plan Needed: United Nations economists forecast growing social unrest next year in the Soviet Union and the former East Bloc, with depression and unemployment pressuring governments to abandon economic reform. The U.N.'s Economic Commission for Europe argued that a Marshall Plan type of coordinated Western assistance could put the region on the road to recovery and political stability.

The United States and its principal Western allies are considering a combination of temporary debt-relief measures for the Soviet Union, including both a deferral of principal payments and a "bridge" loan, Treasury Undersecretary David Mulford told a Senate panel Monday. Some analysts have estimated that, with a significant part of their $70-billion debt coming due in the next few months, the Soviets could be facing a shortfall of more than $5 billion.

The World Bank pledged Thursday to help the Soviet Union overcome its massive economic problems, despite concerns that such aid would divert resources from struggling Third World nations. World Bank President Lewis T. Preston said that aid to Moscow will not place an undue strain on the bank, which annually approves about $16 billion in loans and also dispenses economic expertise.

The Soviet Union, reflecting the continuing rapid deterioration of its economy, has asked Western governments to commit as much as $20 billion to assuring the stability of the ruble--about double the amount it sought as recently as July. The figure was presented over the weekend here in unprecedented meetings between the Soviet Union's chief economic policy-makers and those of the world's largest industrial countries, known as the Group of Seven.

Just when it seems that Indochina is within grasp of winning the international financial aid it so desperately seeks, a powerful competitor comes along and grabs all the attention from lenders. As the World Bank-International Monetary Fund (IMF) annual meeting begins here Tuesday, countries such as Vietnam and Cambodia find themselves vying for attention and dollars against the Soviet Union, which managed to obtain associate IMF membership last week.

Britain, Japan and the European Community said Thursday they are ending a freeze on aid to the Soviet Union, as world leaders hailed the defeat of the hard-line Communist coup. Germany's foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, also told German radio that the collapsed coup should inspire Western nations to release more aid to help the country's faltering economy.

The Soviet Union as a whole should get priority over individual republics in receiving Western aid to support reform, Foreign Minister Roland Dumas said in remarks released here Saturday from an interview with the Soviet news agency Tass.

It will be an uncertain new world order for UNESCO when it opens its biannual general meeting in Paris next week. An ideological battleground during the Cold War, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization lost its main Western support in 1984-85 when the United States and Britain pulled out, charging that the organization was mired in mismanagement and Marxist-Leninist bias.

"If we had as much food as we do problems, we would never be hungry." --A Russian proverb Gregory Tsekher is a man of faith. As the person directly responsible for assuring winter food and medical supplies for this sprawling industrial city of 1.5 million on the edge of the Ural Mountains, he would seem to have little choice.