Baltics Brace for Next Step--Talks on Soviet Pullout : Independence: Officials will focus on terms for military withdrawal and ties to remaining republics.

The Soviet Union may have finally acknowledged the independence of the Baltic states, but to political leaders here and in Latvia and Lithuania this chiefly means they now can begin in earnest the negotiations over the withdrawal of the Soviet military presence that has dominated their lands for 50 years.

“We understand this is going to be a process, not a one-time act, and it will take some time,” Andris Gutmanis, the Latvian deputy minister of economics, said Friday.

More than 250,000 Soviet soldiers, air and naval personnel are stationed in the newly independent states.

Some Baltic officials say the Soviets have demanded significant concessions, possibly including high prices for military property, before they will agree on timetables to move the troops out.

In some cases, Baltic leaders even quietly welcome the continued presence: Estonia, for example, does not have the trained personnel to staff customs and immigration posts at borders and airports, so Soviet and Estonian officials will continue for weeks to man some of these spots side by side.

But Friday’s Estonian press carried photographs of a new Estonian visa required for entry into the country. It supplants the Soviet visa, acceptable up to now.

At Tallinn airport Friday, just before the recognition decree was announced at noon, an Estonian woman of uncertain authority handed out visa application forms. Under the glare of a Soviet officer, she distributed them only to incoming passengers who did not already hold a Soviet entry visa.

Leaders across the Baltic region agreed that Friday’s decree was mostly symbolic, even if they did not all necessarily define the symbol the same way. Steps toward independence have been taken with varying degrees of determination in all three Baltic states since last spring, and they accelerated after the Moscow coup attempt last month.

But with recognition of their independent status finally coming from Moscow, “now people feel the quest for independence has come to completion,” said Rein Koov, executive assistant to Estonian Prime Minister Edgar Savisaar.

Bronislavas Zaikauskas, an economics counselor to the Lithuanian government, chose to view the event as a reminder of the illegality of the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states in 1940, when Josef Stalin took advantage of their helplessness against a Nazi advance and used Soviet military might to impose puppet governments and station large forces within their borders.

“Today’s recognition is not a proper diplomatic act,” he said. “So it has moral but not diplomatic force.”

The decree, nevertheless, anticipates that Moscow will open embassies in each of the states and that the Baltics’ representation offices in Moscow, previously treated as provincial lobbying outposts, will become embassies themselves.

For all that, spokesmen for each of the Baltics said Friday that they would enter into no new political or economic agreement with any new Soviet federation; instead, they will seek bilateral relations with individual republics of the old Soviet empire. Some took the occasion of Friday’s decree to stake out positions on the coming negotiations, including those on apportioning the Soviet Union’s Baltic-based assets among the old central government and the new Baltic states.

“We made an estimate of how much has been invested, and how much transferred to Moscow’s coffers, and the net result is we have paid for what we have, long ago,” Zaikauskas said.

Baltic politicians concede that the Soviet Union’s long attempt to tie their economies closer to its own worked well enough to influence the terms of separation from Moscow.

Undoing the knot will take years. “Our chief concern is of course the financial system,” said Latvia’s Gutmanis. “We are still chained to the ruble economy with its artificially low prices. This acts like a drug. Initially, it gets you high, but the withdrawal is awful, indeed. We must think about some form of social protection for the less-affluent citizens.”

Estonia, meanwhile, has developed what it calls its “three-by-three program,” listing the post-independence goals it hopes to have achieved at the end of three weeks, three months and three years.

After three weeks, the Estonians seek to control all border crossings and civil enforcement arms; the three-month goals include establishing international treaties, concluding terms of separation from the Soviet Union and evaluating ties to other former Soviet Bloc nations in Eastern Europe. In three years, the country hopes to find new energy sources to replace the Soviet oil it has depended upon, strengthen trade ties with the Nordic countries and improve and diversify its agricultural base.