Soviets, New Germany Bury Hatchet With 20-Year Pact : Europe: Kohl tells Gorbachev that the treaty closes ‘a sorrowful chapter in our past.’

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.

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, echoing Gorbachev’s words, decribed the treaty as “closing a sorrowful chapter in our past and opening the way for a new beginning.”

The two countries have fought each other in both world wars this century at a cost of well over 30 million lives between them.

The treaty signing marked the high point of a two-day visit by Gorbachev to Germany, the first head of state received here since German unification last month. The accord was also the first treaty entered into by the recently united country.

Gorbachev travels today to Kohl’s home political base in the Rhineland-Palatinate region west of Frankfurt, where the two will meet informally before the Soviet leader returns to Moscow later in the day.

The comprehensive accord, officially called the Treaty for Good Neighborliness, Partnership and Cooperation, renounces all territorial claims; recognizes Europe’s existing borders; rejects the use of force, and calls for extended cooperation in a variety of areas, including closer economic and political consultation, scientific and technical assistance, and increased unofficial contacts between Soviets and Germans.

Moscow desperately needs German help to rebuild the shattered Soviet economy.

Two other treaties also were signed, one detailing economic, industrial and technical cooperation, the other providing German help in setting up a vocational retraining and social security program in the Soviet Union.

Kohl offered no new direct German aid to the Soviet leader. Instead, he pledged to press the European Community and the G-7 group of industrial nations to come up with their own assistance packages for the economically strapped Soviet Union.

So far this year, Germany has provided Moscow with about $13 billion in grants, payments and untied credits--by far the most of any Western nation. More than $9 billion of this was to pay for the stationing and eventual withdrawal of the estimated 380,000 Soviet troops and 220,000 civilian dependents presently stationed in the five eastern German states, the region that was formerly East Germany.

But far more striking than the absence of any new offers of German money was the sharp change in both the mood and tone of the German-Soviet summit, compared with Gorbachev’s last visit to Bonn in June, 1989.

Amid arms-control breakthroughs and the first hints of revolutionary changes in Eastern Europe, Gorbachev was courted in Bonn by Kohl and repeatedly mobbed by crowds of euphoric Germans.

But Friday, the first anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet leader appeared to have shrunk in stature.

With unification complete, the political leverage that Moscow had held over the Germans for the better part of half a century was gone--and, with it, was public interest.

Gorbachev, hailed so recently as the man who helped put Germany back together, had suddenly become a leader presiding over the disintegration of his own country, a leader whose principal interest in Germany was getting help.

Crowds were sparse and Soviet flags virtually nonexistent.