The World - News from April 3, 1989

A senior Lithuanian Communist Party official conceded that the party had suffered a resounding defeat in the March 26 Soviet parliamentary elections at the hands of the nationalist Sajudis movement. V. Baltrunas, a secretary of the Lithuanian party’s Central Committee, told a regional newspaper that while over half of the 33 candidates elected in Lithuania to the new Congress of People’s Deputies were party members, most had run with the Sajudis against official candidates. “One has to admit that the party organization lost the competition for the popular mandate,” he said. Only three of the party’s nominees were among the 33 elected, he noted.