Lithuanians Protest Refusal to Proclaim ‘Sovereignty’

Chanting “For shame, for shame,” thousands of Lithuanians on Monday jammed the center of Vilnius, the capital of the Soviet Baltic republic of Lithuania, to protest the refusal of their Parliament to proclaim Lithuanian “sovereignty” last week.

Traffic was halted for 10 minutes during the protest, according to observers in Vilnius, as the Lithuanian Reform Movement demonstrated against not only the studiously moderate position of the republic’s Supreme Soviet, or Parliament, but also showed its power and willingness to paralyze the city to score political gains.

As more than 10,000 people gathered at Gediminas Square in central Vilnius, leaders of Sajudis, as the movement is known, called for the resignation of local officials who steered the legislature away from a confrontation with the Kremlin and into a compromise.

The officials “must decide whom they represent--Lithuanians in Lithuania or Russians in Moscow,” Alvydas Medalinskas, the acting secretary of Sajudis, told the impromptu rally. “Their action was detrimental not only to Sajudis but to all of Lithuania.”

Cars Join in Protest

More than two-thirds of the cars in central Vilnius appeared to join the protest, according to residents in the city, and employees at a number of enterprises reportedly joined by halting work for the 10 minutes that it lasted.

“The idea was to give people a sort of chance to vote, to show where they stood,” a Sajudis spokesman said. “What the Supreme Soviet did last week was not a reflection of popular feeling, the people’s will.”

On Friday, the Lithuanian Parliament refused to join the Estonian Supreme Soviet in opposing a series of changes to the Soviet constitution that nationalists in the two Baltic republics see as reducing, rather than increasing, the autonomy of their regions.

The Latvian Supreme Soviet votes today on whether to endorse the constitutional amendments and accompanying election law, which are part of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s broad restructuring of the country’s whole political system.

Although several hundred thousand Latvians have signed petitions demanding that the amendments be rejected, the republic’s leadership has in general backed them, calling for only minor changes.

‘Strong Bureaucracy’

“We will get some support,” a spokeswoman for the Latvian Popular Front, a new grass-roots political movement like Sajudis, said by telephone from Riga, the Latvian capital. “But Latvia is different from Estonia and from Lithuania. We still have a very strong bureaucracy here, and many deputies still support the old system.”

The proposed constitutional amendments remove the right--which all concede now exists only on paper--for the Soviet Union’s 15 constituent republics to secede. Movements such as Sajudis, the Latvian Popular Front and the Estonian Popular Front have responded by reasserting their republics’ “sovereignty” within the Soviet Union and demanding the right to veto national laws dealing with their territory.

Similar calls have come from political activists in the Transcaucasian republics of Armenia and Georgia, but proposals before their legislatures have not yet won support.

On Monday, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation, the largest of the country’s republics, endorsed the proposed amendments and criticized the Estonian action as “against the principles of the Soviet socialist federation” and “hindering development of a united multinational state.”

But the Communist Party leadership, after rejecting the Estonian stand as unconstitutional and endangering national unity, now appears to be shaping a compromise on some of the controversial amendments.

The Communist Party newspaper Pravda reported Monday that a series of changes to nearly half the amendments had been approved so far by a parliamentary committee and would satisfy some of the criticism that the republics are losing all their authority instead of gaining the additional powers they seek for increased autonomy.

Gorbachev himself took a conciliatory position over the weekend, praising the Estonians for their political pioneering but insisting on the need for launching his reform program, known as perestroika, or restructuring, from the center.

Russian patience, never great, is running very short with the rebellious republics.

A Russian member of the Estonian parliament, for example, complained in Pravda over the weekend that he and other ethnic Russians are beginning to “feel like unwanted lodgers no longer welcomed by the hosts.”

Popular Pressure

Vasily Koltakov, one of the seven deputies out of 285 who voted against the “declaration of sovereignty,” also said that his fellow legislators were responding to popular pressures and demands when they supported the resolution last week but that he thought this quite wrong. His resignation was demanded by some of his neighbors and co-workers because of his negative vote, Koltakov said, but he rejected such “intimidation.”

Those who voted against “sovereignty,” he said, intended their votes as an effort to avoid “still greater aggravation of the political situation” in Estonia.