Testing Glasnost

By pre-Gorbachev standards, Soviet authorities showed admirable restraint on Sunday in allowing demonstrators in the three Baltic republics to mount protests against Soviet rule. However, the later arrest of some protest leaders, plus the angry reaction of the controlled Soviet press, illustrates that official tolerance for nationalistic agitation is less than skin deep.

Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were independent nations between World Wars I and II. But on Aug. 23, 1939, Moscow signed a nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany that dealt the three small countries into the Soviet sphere, and shortly afterward into the Soviet Union itself.

Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets on Sunday, the 48th anniversary of the pact, in the republics’ capitals of Riga, Vilnius and Tallinn. Soviet police photographed participants. But apparently they did not interfere except in Riga, where a member of Latvia’s Helsinki Watch Committee reported that many protesters were detained or roughed up and that protest leaders were later placed under house arrest.

In Vilnius demonstrators sang Lithuania’s old national anthem and cheered a call for “freedom.” But the protesters know that independence is not attainable now; their immediate goal is the publication of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin agreement, a memorial to honor Lithuanians who were deported to labor camps under Stalin, and greater freedom for the Roman Catholic Church.

The Soviet media angrily attacked the demonstrations as “hate rallies” inspired by Western broadcasting stations that they accused of trying to fan separatist feelings. The Voice of America, the Vatican Radio and similar foreign broadcasting services did help publicize plans for the demonstrations, but many participants said that they in fact learned of the forthcoming protests from denunciations in the Soviet press.

The demonstrations are the latest examples of the contradiction between Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s announced policy of glasnost , or openness, and the regime’s determination to suppress the nationalistic, frequently anti-Russian sentiments that boil beneath the surface in the Soviet Union’s non-Russian republics.

Gorbachev has told Soviet intellectuals that the truth should be told about dark periods in the country’s past. But as one foreign diplomat said, “Moscow says that people are free to speak about their problems. So the Balts do exactly that, and suddenly you have demonstrations, which Moscow does not like.”

Last December a bloody riot erupted in Kazakhstan when a local party boss was sacked, and a university student was later executed for his role in the riot. Crimean Tatars demanding the restoration of their autonomous republic staged protests a few weeks ago in Moscow’s Red Square and in Uzbekistan. The Soviet press also has reported nationalist tensions in Tadzhikistan, Kirghizia and Moldavia. In June, 5,000 Latvians assembled in Riga to mark the anniversary of “deportation day” 47 years ago, when Stalin sent thousands of Balts into exile.

None of these protests have been of revolutionary proportions. But they pose a serious problem for Gorbachev. If he cracks down with the full power of the police state, his glasnost campaign’s credibility will suffer at home and in the West, too. Yet if he makes concessions to one or another of the Soviet Union’s many restless nationalities, he will face renewed demands from the others--and will anger ethnic Russians in the process. So far he hasn’t found a middle ground that works.