Lithuanian Urges Patience to Win Reform

The head of Lithuania’s independence movement, in a rousing yet cautionary report to Los Angeles’ Lithuanian community, issued a plea Sunday for “true freedom” in his homeland but warned that reformists must tread carefully.

Vytautis Landsbergis, a music professor and chairman of Lithuania’s Sajudis movement for freedom from Soviet control, spoke to several hundred people at the St. Casimir Roman Catholic Church near Silver Lake, a parish that for years has been a rallying center for the local Lithuanian community.

Leaders of the community estimate their numbers at 50,000 throughout Southern California. Many of the people in the audience remembered fleeing Lithuania to the United States during World War II.

Landsbergis, 57, on a U.S. speaking tour, said significant progress has been made in the small Baltic republic’s struggle for demokratija , but he urged Lithuanian Americans to have patience. The fight for greater independence has to be nonviolent and evolutionary, not revolutionary, or the world could witness repressions “as in China,” he said.

“One of my fears is that the people will not be patient enough, and that could be dangerous,” Landsbergis said. “We do not feel riots and the use of force are appropriate for our goals.”

Lithuania is the largest of the three Baltic republics taken over by the Soviet military in 1940. Fueled in part by the reforms of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, ethnically inspired independence movements have grown in strength in many parts of the Soviet Union.

The strength and appeal of Lithuania’s Sajudis movement became evident last March when it defeated the Communist Party to win 30 of 42 seats in the Congress of People’s Deputies, the Soviet national assembly. Later, when the congress met to elect its lawmaking arm, the Supreme Soviet, Landsbergis stood to demand that voting rules be changed, a gesture that provoked outcry from Communist delegates and prompted Gorbachev to warn the Lithuanian representatives against creating a “crisis situation.”

Despite Landsbergis’ words of caution in Los Angeles, he outlined plans that left no mistake about his zealous commitment to reform. The agenda included eventual withdrawal of Soviet troops, amendments to the Lithuanian constitution to give the republic more control over its natural resources and a call to annul the elections of 1940, considered by many Lithuanians to be a farce, that put Communists in office.

“We do not want a little freedom, something that improves our life style a bit,” Landsbergis said. “We want true freedom. We want the rights that any free country would give its citizens.”

At the same time, Landsbergis repeatedly expressed confidence in changes within the Communist Party itself that will make negotiating with Moscow possible.

Asked later about his opinion of Gorbachev, Landsbergis said he admired the Soviet leader’s dynamism and willingness to entertain new ideas.

But, he added, “I am afraid he is still limited in his mind about the rights of the nations and republics” that form part of the Soviet Union.

Landsbergis spoke in Lithuanian and his speech and comments were translated for a reporter. He arrived in Los Angeles on Saturday with his wife, Grazina, and was scheduled to fly to Washington on Sunday night after a Los Feliz reception and dinner in his honor. In addition to his speech at St. Casimir, he visited Disneyland.