Aid for Soviet Reforms Tops Summit Agenda : Diplomacy: Bush and Gorbachev hope to define their nations’ growing partnership for the next decade.

Beyond arms control, the Middle East and the other familiar issues of Soviet-American summits stands a single question that will dominate the meeting here this week between George Bush and Mikhail S. Gorbachev: What will the United States do to help the Soviet Union move toward full democracy and establish a free-market economy?

This week’s summit, centered on two days of intense dialogue between the Soviet and U.S. presidents, is expected to set relations between the two countries on a course for the next decade and, in the process, help shape the future political and economic character of the Soviet Union.

After decades of rivalry, relations between the two superpowers have changed dramatically in the last five years, taking them from Cold War confrontation to cooperation in resolving world crises, and both countries now want to define what amounts to an international partnership.

“It is really the first post-Cold War summit, and the fundamental discussions will be on the evolving new relationship with the Soviet Union,” Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security adviser, said in Washington last week.

“This is a real opportunity for the two to talk conceptually, philosophically about a relationship that has evolved with extreme rapidity.”

The Soviet expectation is put in similar broad terms that view the summit meeting as a historical pivot in superpower relations.

“We are transferring to a new epoch in relations with the United States,” Vitaly N. Ignatenko, the Soviet president’s press secretary, said last week. “The forthcoming summit will launch new priorities with economic issues and cooperation on regional conflicts at the top of the agenda.”

Hidden in the phrasing about improved “economic relations,” however, is one especially significant change: Washington’s readiness to assist the transformation of the Soviet Union and Moscow’s desire for such help.

Scowcroft was candid when asked at a Washington briefing last week about the American goal for the summit: “The (U.S.) message is really fairly simple. It is two words--democracy and marketization of the economy. That’s what we would like to see.”

And Condoleezza Rice, a former Bush aide now teaching at Stanford University, was even more plain. “This summit is really about the future of the Soviet Union,” she said. “It’s as close as we’ve ever seen to the United States getting actively involved in Soviet internal affairs.”

Both Soviet and U.S. officials expect the two presidents to spend much of their time focused on Gorbachev’s efforts to pull the Soviet Union out of its profound political and economic crisis and on what the United States and the West can do to help.

This will have Bush, once again, discussing Gorbachev’s agenda for Soviet-American relations rather than his own, but it is an agenda that Scowcroft said Bush shares.

“The question before Bush in this summit is one of the most serious an American president has had to face in relations with the Soviet Union, and I do not exclude those questions that have involved war and peace,” Stanislav Kondrashov, a foreign policy commentator for the newspaper Izvestia, said in an interview.

“What will be the fate of the Soviet Union, and what should the United States and the West do about it? That is what this summit is about. . . . But the answers George Bush gets from Mikhail Gorbachev will not be final or complete because we ourselves don’t know and Gorbachev alone cannot give an answer.”

Michael Mandelbaum at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York agreed on this new agenda for Soviet-American relations, but questioned how much could be done at summit meetings.

“The great East-West task now is to integrate the Soviet Union into the international economy,” Mandelbaum said in an interview. “This is not a task on the Western side for the United States alone but rather for the Group of Seven (leading industrial democracies). And it depends not only on what governments do, but on what societies, individuals, private sectors do.”

The West, said Sergei Karaganov, deputy director of the Soviet Institute of Europe, “cannot shy away from the question of aid--do you want this country to survive, to reform itself or to collapse in ruins? Massive Western investment and assistance will be needed.”

Soviet expectations are high for Moscow sees Bush as the Western leader who will make the basic decision on how much help the Soviet Union will get.

“Bush casts the deciding vote in the Group of Seven--still,” a Gorbachev aide commented. “Although four clearly favored Gorbachev’s participation in the (Group of Seven’s) London summit, he was not invited until Bush said OK. The same is true of trade credits, loans, technical assistance. If Bush agrees, it will flow, maybe not from the United States but from the West.”

The two presidents are expected to sign a new umbrella agreement on technical cooperation in three areas crucial for the Soviet Union’s modernization--the conversion of defense industries to civilian production, development of energy resources and food processing.

According to a draft, the agreement calls for “technical economic cooperation to promote market-oriented reforms” and authorizes joint projects at all levels of government, allowing the United States to work directly with those Soviet republics prepared to move ahead.

The other major items on the agenda include a discussion of the next stage in arms control and the coordination of their approaches in a new Middle East peace effort.

The next stage in arms negotiations is far from certain. In both Moscow and Washington, those who want to pause and develop a new approach outnumber those who believe that the momentum of this agreement, which reduces the two countries’ strategic arsenals by an average of 30%, should be used to achieve deeper cuts.

A senior Bush Administration official in Washington described the treaty Bush and Gorbachev will sign as “the last big arms control agreement of its kind,” suggesting that the United States wanted to explore different ways to improve both countries’ security.

“How can we change the focus of arms control, which up to now has been a competitive process dealing with issues on which the two sides definitely were antagonistic, into what ought to be a broader security relationship?” Scowcroft said.

Georgy A. Arbatov, director of the U.S.A. Institute in Moscow and the Soviet Union’s leading specialist on the United States, has urged Gorbachev to propose discussions on extensive demilitarization of both countries.

“This summit should have been a breakthrough summit that would not so much close the last chapter of our relations, but open a new one,” Arbatov said in an interview. “Even now, the model for negotiations remains the model of the Cold War when negotiations were run by the two military-industrial complexes, and the talks are still aimed at managing the arms race instead of ending it.

“What I would advise Gorbachev . . . is (to) begin serious talk with Bush not only about the past but about the future, about how it’s necessary to move from these cosmetic agreements . . . to real agreements on ways of demilitarizing our countries.”

Boris D. Pyadyshev, a top Soviet Foreign Ministry official and editor of the foreign policy journal International Affairs, called the summit with its shift from arms control to economic issues “the last of the old series and the first of the new” of summits.

“Bush does need to think about domestic developments in the Soviet Union if he wants to think about the long-term relationship between us and the United States,” Pyadyshev said in an interview. “This itself reflects a change in the relationship and will bring further changes. But consider, a major partner of the United States is in the process of profound transformation, and that cannot be a small matter for an American President.”

Mandelbaum, describing this week’s meeting as a likely landmark in Soviet-American relations, drew parallels between this Bush-Gorbachev summit and those in 1945 between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin at Yalta and in 1972 between President Richard M. Nixon and Leonid I. Brezhnev in Moscow as setting the long-term course for the two countries.

Yalta marked the beginning of the Cold War, Mandelbaum said, and “it was clear retrospectively that the United States and the Soviet Union would be rivals and their rivalry would be the axis along which international politics would be aligned.”

“The 1972 summit in Moscow set the pattern for two decades,” Mandelbaum continued. “From that summit stemmed the expectation that summits would be regular occurrences and from that summit stemmed the expectation and custom that arms control would be the centerpiece of these meetings.”

For two decades, summit meetings and the elaborate negotiations, particularly on arms reduction, were the mechanism by which Soviet-American relations remained in equilibrium and through which the world was reassured that the superpowers would not go to war.

With the burden of their relationship now shifting to economic cooperation, other forums--trade talks, Group of Seven meetings, International Monetary Fund consultations--will supplant the old Soviet-American arms negotiations and summit preparations, according to Mandelbaum.

“While this is not the last meeting between the leaders of the two countries,” Mandelbaum said, “in the traditional postwar sense it is the last summit.”

Parks reported from Moscow and McManus reported from Washington.