Wives’ Day Is Quackers and Ease : Sidelights: Cattiness of Reagan years disappears as the two have a good time.

As their husbands conferred in the Kremlin, Barbara Bush and Raisa Gorbachev together perfected a new technique destined to become a classic in the annals of superpower relations: duckling diplomacy.

Beneath a perfect blue Moscow sky, on the grassy banks of a picturesque pond set beneath the gold domes of Novodevichy Monastery, the two first ladies held a dedication ceremony for a bronze mother duck and her eight comical ducklings, the replica of a Boston sculpture based on the American children’s classic, “Make Way for Ducklings.”

“There’s something magical about the thought of American children loving and playing with ducks in Boston while children in Moscow are doing the same,” Mrs. Bush said. “The shared laughter of Soviet and American children will be just one more sign that our two great countries have many more things in common than we do differences.”

Mrs. Gorbachev, too, praised the statues--copies of the group she saw when strolling in the Boston Public Garden with Mrs. Bush last summer.

“May this small, touching work of art be a kind, memorable contribution to the general, great business of bringing together the Soviet and American peoples,” she said. “That is the goal of the meeting and talks today between the presidents of the United States and Soviet Union.”

Raisa Gorbachev then proceeded to teach the dozens of crisply dressed and beribboned children gathered for the dedication the names of the ducklings.

“Coo-ack,” she quacked with a broad Russian A. “Lack! Pack! Oo-ack! This is what the ducklings are called.”

Quacking aside, the visit between the two first ladies got off to a harmonious start. Mrs. Gorbachev, who often wears a somewhat pinched, prissy look, broke into a broad, unmistakably sincere grin as she welcomed Mrs. Bush in the Kremlin on Tuesday morning with a bouquet of roses.

The two first ladies often held hands during a stroll around the Kremlin’s churches, helping each other over treacherous cobblestones and fending off reporters and enthusiastic tourists who suddenly converged on the official group, to the dismay of American security guards.

Mrs. Bush referred to her Soviet counterpart as “my good friend, Raisa Gorbachev.”

Gone were Mrs. Gorbachev’s old ways of exchanging catty digs and competing for the limelight with Nancy Reagan, who, when escorted through churches, had an inconvenient habit of asking whether they were used for public worship--they were not--and thus obliquely referring to the Communist Party’s brutal repression of religion.

Barbara Bush, on being shown the wonders of the Kremlin, including the czarist jewels and gold in the armory, mainly confined herself to exclamations of wonder. At the display of Catherine the Great’s crown, a dazzling dome of diamonds known as the Symphony in Diamonds, she goggled and said, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Gone, too, were the so-called style wars that Nancy Reagan and Raisa Gorbachev engaged in, vying to outdo each other on the high-fashion designer front. On Tuesday, the ensembles suggested a certain down-to-earth comfort. Mrs. Bush wore a tomato-red Bill Blass ensemble to the Kremlin and sensible low heels for the jaunt around the grounds. Mrs. Gorbachev had on a plaid suit. Both outfits looked serviceable but far from ground-breaking.

It was the duckling ceremony, however, that best demonstrated the growing warmth between the presidential spouses.

With Mrs. Gorbachev smiling patiently at her side, Barbara Bush took on a bedtime-story tone as she explained how “this mother duck and her eight ducklings found their way to Moscow”:

“In 1941, a wonderful man named Robert McCloskey wrote a children’s book called ‘Make Way for Ducklings.’ It’s the story of a family of ducks and how, after much searching, they found a home in a park called the Public Garden in Boston, Mass.”

McCloskey, 76, attended the ceremony and was visibly moved by the international homage: “I never expected--who would expect?--I couldn’t imagine this ever happening.”

Mrs. Bush described how well-loved the book has become for millions of Americans, and how the two first ladies visited the Boston statue last year, prompting sculptor Nancy Schon to offer to make a copy for the children of the Soviet Union.

Mrs. Gorbachev entered fully into the spirit of the day, comparing the ducklings to those of a tale well-known in Russia, and explaining to the children that these ducks, too, could speak human language and tell kindness from cruelty.

Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov joined in the duckling pageantry, but, as a prominent leader of the opposition to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s Communist Party, he also hastened to point out the current difficulties of living in the Soviet Union--even for ducklings.

“The mallard family now is in Moscow,” he said. “As the mayor of this city, I regret to tell these wonderful ducklings we see in front of us that unfortunately the life in this city is far from perfect. That is why you ducklings are not going to have a very simple and easy life here, just like all us Muscovites. “

But finally he assured the ducklings, “Life in this city will be improved gradually, and in the end you will live here as well and happily as you do in Boston.”