THE MALTA SUMMIT : Upheaval in Eastern Europe Increases Stakes at Malta Summit : Diplomacy: The Administration is convinced that a new kind of U.S.-Soviet relationship is possible.

When President Bush announced that he would meet Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the Mediterranean this weekend, he described the meeting in deliberately modest terms--”a chance to put our feet up and talk.”

But the first Bush-Gorbachev summit, only three days away, has already turned into much more.

The upheaval in Eastern Europe, where three Soviet Bloc regimes have fallen to reformists in a little more than a month, has forced its way to the top of the summit agenda.

Bush on Tuesday decried “hyped speculation” about the summit and promised, “There won’t be a surprise.” But at the same time, his aides have begun talking about the meeting as a possible landmark in U.S.-Soviet relations--reflecting a gradual but significant evolution in the Administration’s thinking about Gorbachev.

A year of momentous events, from the Soviet Union’s parliamentary elections last spring through the peaceful revolutions in East Germany and Czechoslovakia this fall, has convinced even skeptics in the Administration that a new kind of U.S.-Soviet relationship is possible.

Now more than ever, Bush and his advisers acknowledge that the United States has a stake in peaceful reform in the Soviet Bloc--and say they are willing to work with President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to ensure that reforms continue.

The President sent Moscow a public signal of his intentions last week, praising Gorbachev as “the dynamic architect of Soviet reform” and making an extraordinary pledge: “There is no greater advocate of perestroika than the President of the United States.”

“What we have seen . . . is evidence that Gorbachev is willing to work with us,” a senior White House official explained. “Gorbachev, in many respects, has sort of proved his bona fides. “

With a little luck, he said, the summit off the coast of Malta could launch “a very candid, very basic dialogue of a kind that has never taken place between an American President and a Soviet leader.”

The goal, the official added, “is a level of engagement across the board by knowledgeable, well-informed people that has never happened before . . . (a) kind of dialogue that’s not couched in terms of a specific arms control agreement or regional issue but, if anything, the foundations of the relationship.”

In an intensive series of briefings before the summit, Bush advisers have mapped out the issues they want the President to explore in his conversations with Gorbachev--the major elements of the evolving U.S.-Soviet relationship:

Arms control and other national security issues, focusing on both countries’ desire to cut their defense budgets, reduce their conventional armed forces in Europe and shrink their nuclear arsenals.

U.S. complaints about Soviet behavior in the Third World, especially Moscow’s tolerance of continuing Cuban aid to leftist forces in Central America.

The process of reform itself: a better understanding of Gorbachev’s plans for both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and their implications for the West.

“This (the reform process) has become very important for the United States--and this is new since Gorbachev,” the senior official said. “. . . There is a sense that the long-term security interests of the United States will be advanced by a successful reform effort in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, because the very success of that effort will require a restructuring of their priorities in a way that, in our view, would enhance stability.”

Bush and his aides maintain that their basic, cautious policy toward the Soviet Union hasn’t changed fundamentally: They still intend to follow “the course of prudence,” a senior official said.

Moreover, they insist that there is little the United States can do to help Gorbachev’s reforms succeed, beyond the offers already made of U.S. economic advice.

“I just can’t design a policy which would help Gorbachev in a direct way,” one of the President’s advisers said. “We are at the margin.”

Still, the Administration’s new tone on perestroika --Gorbachev’s program of political and economic restructuring--is markedly different from policy statements at the beginning of the year, when Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III laid out a series of foreign policy tests for Gorbachev to meet.

Essentially, officials said, Gorbachev began meeting those tests faster than anyone predicted, especially in his active promotion of democratic reform in Eastern Europe. As a result, the Administration’s tone has gradually shifted toward applause as well as demands.

“We want perestroika to succeed,” Baker said in a key speech last month laying out much of the new formula. “It would be folly indeed to miss this opportunity. Soviet ‘new thinking’ in foreign and defense policy promises possibilities that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.”

At the same time, ironically, U.S. analysts have concluded that perestroika’s chances of success are waning as Gorbachev’s initial steps toward comprehensive economic reform have run into serious resistance. That finding renewed the debate inside the Administration about the implications for U.S. foreign policy if perestroika should fail--a debate that Baker attempted to end by declaring that Gorbachev’s domestic problems should spur the United States to move even more quickly toward arms control agreements.

“Any uncertainty about the fate of reform in the Soviet Union . . . is all the more reason, not less, for us to seize the present opportunity,” he said. “For the works of our labor--a diminished Soviet threat and effectively verifiable agreements--can endure even if perestroika does not.”

The Administration did not always speak so clearly. Indeed, during his first three months in office, Bush said almost nothing at all about his attitude toward the Soviet Union, saying that he wanted aides to complete a massive review of foreign policy first.

In fact, officials said, one of the President’s main concerns at the time was to slow the pace of the U.S.-Soviet rapprochement that had begun under his predecessor, Ronald Reagan. Bush and his aides were convinced that Reagan and his secretary of state, George P. Shultz, had moved too quickly to embrace Gorbachev.

So clear was the difference that at the last U.S.-Soviet summit meeting of the Reagan Administration, held at Governor’s Island in New York Harbor last December, Gorbachev confronted Bush, demanding to know whether he supported perestroika. Bush, taken aback, responded that he did.

But the first actions of the new Administration were skeptical. Bush and Baker slowed the strategic arms reduction talks, saying they weren’t sure the draft treaty negotiated during the Reagan Administration was “ratifiable.” They reacted testily to Gorbachev’s increasing popularity in Western Europe and his unilateral arms-reduction proposals. And White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater even called the Kremlin leader a “drugstore cowboy.”

But Gorbachev continued promoting reforms, withdrawing Soviet troops from Eastern Europe and soaring in Western public opinion polls. The pressure on the Administration wasn’t coming from a Republican right suspicious about arms control pacts but instead from West Germany and other U.S. allies that wanted to move faster toward East-West cooperation.

Series of Challenges

Last spring, Bush responded with a series of challenges to Gorbachev, summed up in a May 12 speech at Texas A&M; University: “Mr. Gorbachev,” he said, “don’t stop now.” He called on the Soviet leader to cut his armed forces, allow Eastern European nations to go their own way, allow more freedom at home, work with the West to address problems such as terrorism and take new steps toward solving Third World conflicts.

On four of those five issues, Gorbachev responded clearly. He continued to withdraw troops from Eastern Europe and moved toward deeper cuts at the Vienna negotiations over conventional forces in Europe. He allowed Hungary to tear down its border fences with the West--the “Iron Curtain”--and encouraged Poland to hold democratic elections. He opened up the Soviet political system and made Jewish emigration so easy that U.S. refugee quotas were swamped. He entered into serious talks about cooperation on terrorism, drugs and the environment. Only on Third World issues are U.S. officials seriously dissatisfied, because of continued massive Soviet aid to Afghanistan and Cuba.

The most striking change, U.S. officials say, has been in Eastern Europe. Bush himself visited Poland and Hungary in July and described the reforms there as breathtaking.

What most impressed the President, officials said, was the unanimous message from Polish and Hungarian officials that Gorbachev supported their efforts--and their suggestion that Bush and Gorbachev should talk directly about the area’s evolution. It was then, Bush has said, that he decided to seek an early meeting with Gorbachev.

Since July, the pace of change has accelerated swiftly: new Soviet proposals for arms control; a new, opposition-led government in Poland; reformist governments in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, and, perhaps most astonishingly, the opening of the Berlin Wall by a new East German government that Gorbachev helped to gain power.

“If we had our breath taken away by what we saw in Poland and Hungary in July, I don’t know how to describe our reaction to what we’ve seen this fall,” a White House aide said.

It is these developments that have led Bush and his aides to their new, more bullish tone on cooperation with the Soviet Union, officials say. And yet, at the same time, they admit to some nagging doubts, and a sense that caution is still the byword.

“Gorbachev’s problems, at home, seem almost insurmountable,” said one aide. “We say we want perestroika to succeed, but in the backs of our minds, we can’t quite see how it’s going to.

“That’s why you’ll see a certain amount of caution,” he said. “We still plan to respond to events on the ground--not words.”