Moscow Fires Party Leader in Estonia

The Communist Party leader in the Baltic Soviet republic of Estonia was abruptly replaced Thursday amid indications of Kremlin concern over growing Estonian nationalism.

Karl G. Vaino, 65, who had been the party’s first secretary in Estonia for a decade, was replaced by Vaino I. Vaelas, 57, an Estonian who has served recently as the Soviet ambassador to Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Tass, the official Soviet news agency, gave no reason for Vaino’s replacement, which occurred at a meeting of the Estonian party Central Committee. Some official explanation is customary.

Although Vaino has been criticized recently in the official press and is thought by many observers to be resistant to the country’s current reforms, he had told journalists last month that he would “vote with both hands” to ensure that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev remained in power and carried out his program of radical change.

Vaelas, described as an experienced organizer and persuasive speaker, did not lay out his platform at the meeting, saying, according to Tass, that he first wants to consult other members of the Estonian leadership.

Before becoming a diplomat in 1980, Vaelas had headed the Communist Party for a decade in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, served as a secretary of the Estonian party Central Committee and led the Communist Youth League in the republic.

“His reputation as a thoughtful and competent leader earned him the majority of votes during the balloting,” Tass said, without indicating whether there were other candidates.

Continuing Struggle

The change in the Estonian party leadership came less than two weeks before a special national conference in Moscow to discuss the future direction of political and economic perestroika , as Gorbachev calls his reform program. It underlined the continuing struggle between the reformers and their conservative opposition in the party and in the government.

Commenting on the recent turmoil in the southern Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Communist Party’s youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said it was “a blow at perestroika , possibly the most serious blow yet,” and “a challenge to the ideals of glasnost (political openness), a chance for conservatives to strengthen their point of view” against the reforms.

In Estonia, which the Soviet Union annexed along with Lithuania and Latvia in 1940, strong nationalism has long posed a serious challenge to Soviet rule.

February Demonstration

“Get the Russians out!” several thousand Estonians shouted in February during a street demonstration in Tallinn to mark the republic’s independence in 1918, at the end of World War I.

The party’s secretary for ideology had been dismissed six weeks earlier, in January, for failing to curb “nationalistic manifestations” in Estonia after repeated public protests through 1986 and 1987.

Yet the demonstrations have continued unabated. Thousands of Estonians took to the streets again this week to recall the late dictator Josef Stalin’s mass deportations of potential opponents from the three Baltic republics as he consolidated Soviet rule in the region.

Estonia’s growing nationalist sentiment comes at a time when massive protests have been held in Armenia and neighboring Azerbaijan in a dispute over the largely Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is in Azerbaijan. That issue is now before the Kremlin leadership for resolution.

Party Bosses Fired

The party first secretaries in Armenia and Azerbaijan were replaced a month ago for failing to deal satisfactorily with ethnic tension there.

Nationalism also appears to be increasing in the other Baltic republics, Latvia and Lithuania, where there were anti-Stalinist demonstrations Tuesday; in the Ukraine; in Moldavia, on the border with Romania; in Kazakhstan and other parts of Soviet Central Asia, and even in Yakut region, in northwestern Siberia.

The reforms instituted by Gorbachev have made it increasingly possible for national grievances to be aired, Soviet observers note, and this has led to even more political contention.

Word From Intellectuals

At a meeting in April, Estonia’s leading intellectuals told the Soviet leadership that national tensions were growing not only there but also across the Soviet Union because of tight, centralized control of the autonomous, nominally independent republics.

The intellectuals, leaders of the small Baltic state’s six official cultural unions, said their people were facing a “demographic crisis” because of uncontrolled immigration into Estonia.

In letters that constituted a rare challenge to Soviet authority from within the political system, the Estonian intellectuals said that current practices, largely dictated by party and government bureaucrats, threatened “a sharpening of national (ethnic) relations and growth in the dissatisfaction of local populations with the policies of the central authorities.”

Debate continued for 20 hours, according to writers and journalists who attended the session, and led to a call for new measures, including constitutional amendments, “to ensure the economic and cultural sovereignty of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic and its right to be the one to decide its own affairs.”

Speakers at the meeting, all of them members of official government-established groups, most of them Communist Party members and none of them dissidents, called for Estonian to be declared the one official language to stop the increasing use of Russian. At the same time, they urged that those unable to speak Estonian be barred from top positions and that Moscow’s controls over the Estonian economy be severed.

‘Major Obstacle’

“Overcentralization, terrible in its inhumanity,” had emerged as the major obstacle to the political, economic and social reforms under way nationwide, the writer Vladimir Beekman told the meeting.

“Central ministries have turned themselves into effective empires, lording it up and fawningly supported by the local vassals,” he declared.

Some steps were taken, including greater economic autonomy than Estonia had had until then, but they fell far short of what the intellectuals proposed.