Soviet Minister Sees End to Warsaw Pact

MOSCOW--Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze says the Soviet Union is willing to negotiate an end to the NATO and Warsaw Pact military alliances and plans to eliminate its own overseas bases by the year 2000.

And he has promised that as East bloc countries move away from one-party Communist rule, the Soviet Union will observe strict principles of non-intervention and "absolute freedom of choice."

In a major foreign policy address to the Supreme Soviet legislature on Monday, Shevardnadze also condemned his predecessors' decision to send troops into Afghanistan, calling it a "gross violation" of Soviet law and ethics.

He also admitted that the Soviet radar station in Krasnoyarsk violated the U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. The Soviets said last month that it would be dismantled, ending a dispute that soured U.S.-Soviet arms control talks for years.

Shevardnadze's speech was extraordinary in its frankness and elevated the Supreme Soviet to a forum for major policy statements.

Without specifically mentioning any East bloc country, he said Moscow would henceforth relate to its Warsaw Pact allies on the basis of "sovereign equality, the impermissibility of any kind of intervention and the recognition that each country has the right to absolute freedom of choice."

Poland and Hungary, former one-party Communist states, are hurtling toward Western-style democracy and hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets in East Germany to demand a similar transformation.

The foreign minister said Moscow is prepared to licquidate all its foreign bases by the year 2000 and draw back to within its own borders.

He did not specify what conditions would be set for such a withdrawal, but a year ago President Mikhail S. Gorbachev announced the start of a pullback that he said would result in a pullback that he said would cut Soviet military forces by 500,000.

And he said his government is "prepared to head toward the dissolution of the military-political blocs in Europe" in a mutual arrangement worked out by NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

He added, however, that despite recent historic changes in the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union considers that "all our obligations remain in force."

Shevardnadze denounced the decision by the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev to send Soviet soldiers into Afghanistan in December 1979 to help the Marxist government there fight the anti-communist guerrillas.

He disavowed any connection with the decision to intervene and said it involved "gross violations of our own laws, intra-party and civil norms and ethics.

"A decision that had very serious consequences for our country was made behind the back of the party and the people," Shevardnadze said in the speech, the full text of which was carried by the official Tass news agency.

It was not the first time highly placed Soviets have disclosed that the decision to intervene in Afghanistan was made by a small circle around Brezhnev. But it had not previously been characterized by a government spokesman as an outright violation of law.

The last Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan in February.

Shevardnadze said it took Gorbachev's government four years to determine that the location of the Krasnoyarsk radar station in Siberia violated the 1972 ABM treaty, as claimed repeatedly by the United States.

He said that as the Soviet Union tried to move forward on arms treaties based on the pact "there stood the station, the size of an Egyptian pyramid, representing, to put it bluntly, a violation of the ABM treaty."