The ice has been broken." So allowed an impassive Mikhail Gorbachev as he stood beside a wooden-faced Helmut Kohl amid the czarist splendor of the Kremlin's St. George Hall. The Soviet leader's chilly assessment of his first private meeting with the West German Chancellor brought little warmth to the thaw in relations between the Soviet Union and West Germany. But that hardly mattered in the cold calculation of national interests that dominated four days of careful, even curt talks between Europe's two pre-eminent powers. Gorbachev's impoverished military superpower is keen to profit from Western investment and trade. And West Germany has joined the stampede to turn perestroika to its own economic and political advantage. By the time Kohl departed, both leaders hoped they had laid the basis for a new model of relations between Western Europe and the Soviet Union.
Bonn and Moscow have been at arm's length for five years, ever since West Germany agreed to deploy intermediate-range nuclear missiles aimed at the U.S.S.R. The gulf widened in 1986 when Kohl compared Gorbachev with the infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Now the missiles are going, and Gorbachev has evidently swallowed his personal grievance in hopes of cashing in on Europe's newfound enthusiasm for his grand plan for reform. And cash in he did. The 70 top-ranking West German businessmen who accompanied Kohl offered the Soviets a $1.7 billion line of credit and some 30 trade agreements worth about $1.5 billion. Only two weeks before the Germans arrived, Italy's Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita cemented deals worth billions of dollars during his own three-day visit to Moscow.
The Western credits come none too soon for Gorbachev's rickety economy. The day after Kohl's departure, Soviet leaders admitted for the first time that their government has been running a hefty budget deficit. Finance Minister Boris Gostev told members of the Soviet parliament that this year's red ink would total $58.8 billion.
The unprecedented confession that a deficit exists signaled that the Soviet Union may have to rely even more heavily on foreign trade and investment to feed and clothe its population. To help attract funds from abroad, Gostev offered to let foreign businessmen buy controlling interests in joint ventures with the Soviets. The concession was shocking in terms of Communist ideology, but fresh evidence of Gorbachev's willingness to cross Marxist boundaries in pursuit of economic improvement.
To a degree, most of Europe embraces the notion that perestroika represents a golden opportunity to increase trade. But some Europeans hope to collect a bonus by inducing Western-style change in the Soviet political system. "If Gorbachev's reforms are to succeed," says a British diplomat, "they can only do so by making the Soviet Union a very different place." West German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher, among the first to welcome Gorbachev's promised reforms, argues that the West would be negligent if it ignored the "historic opportunity" offered by the Soviet leader to turn his country into a more agreeable neighbor.