‘Big Changes’ to Result From Malta Talks, Soviets Say : Diplomacy: ‘The world is leaving the Cold War age,’ a Tass commentator asserts.

The Soviet Union, assessing the weekend summit meeting between President Bush and President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, said Monday that it now expects a series of major international developments, including broad new agreements reducing armed forces and easing East-West tension, within the next year.

Gennady I. Gerasimov, the chief spokesman for the Soviet Foreign Ministry, predicted: “We will have very big changes in the world next year, and they will be attributable to the Malta summit.

“Maybe the Malta summit will be remembered as the time when the Cold War was buried deep down at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea,” Gerasimov said, reflecting Moscow’s clear satisfaction with the weekend meetings.

A commentator for Tass, the official Soviet news agency, described the Malta talks as “the most important and most memorable political event” of the year.

The commentator, Yuri Kornilov, said that Bush and Gorbachev had agreed that “the world is leaving the Cold War age and entering a new era of a durable and strong peace.”

Gorbachev, briefing leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries at a meeting Monday in Moscow, said his talks with Bush had greatly narrowed differences between East and West and demonstrated the validity of “new political thinking,” as he describes his foreign policy initiatives.

Kornilov said in his commentary that Bush has recognized the pivotal role of perestroika , as Gorbachev calls his sweeping political and economic reforms, in changing the international climate, and that this recognition will add to the momentum of those changes.

“A turn to a new, better world, which is being advocated by an ever-growing part of mankind, cannot take place,” Kornilov said, “without Soviet perestroika, without the fundamental changes now taking place in East European countries, signifying a breakthrough toward democratization and humane socialism.”

Gerasimov characterized the talks “as a meeting of two serious world leaders discussing serious problems, the world’s problems, in a cooperative way.”

For Moscow, the key measure in practical terms remains progress on disarmament, and Gerasimov emphasized the Soviet Union’s broad satisfaction in this respect.

Based on Bush’s commitment to accelerate and perhaps broaden negotiations between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact, Moscow expects an agreement to be concluded next year on reducing conventional armed forces in Europe, Gerasimov said. The Kremlin expects a treaty to be signed at an East-West summit conference, he added.

The two leaders also gave “critical impetus” to the prolonged negotiations on reducing the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals by 50%, Gerasimov said, adding that serious differences, as well as the technical complexity of the proposed agreement, remain.

Soviet officials, like their U.S. counterparts, believe that all of the central issues will be resolved by the next Soviet-American summit conference--in Washington in late June--but that resolution of technical but important details might take another six months.

“We don’t know when we can sign this,” Gerasimov said. “Both sides agreed that the sooner the better. But we need to clear up many things, including the coordination between the (1972) Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative and this new agreement. These are not simple, and they need clarification.”

Kornilov, the Tass commentator, said that Bush and Gorbachev had reaffirmed their countries’ commitment “to solve, step by step, that most important task--the curbing of the arms race, in practically all areas.”

The Soviet Union welcomed Bush’s offer to halt U.S. production of chemical weapons as an important step toward a treaty banning such weapons worldwide, Gerasimov said, and this move should accelerate those slow-moving negotiations.