Baltic Lands Get Soviet Warning : Party Leaders Hint at Crackdown Over Campaigns for Independence

The Soviet leadership, in a warning that hinted at a crackdown in the Baltic republics, said Saturday that activists pressing for independence are leading the region into an abyss that could endanger its survival.

The Central Committee declaration, read at the start of the main evening news broadcast on Soviet television, also lashed out at local party leadership in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, saying that some officials had fostered links with extremists calling for a break from the Soviet Union.

It was the clearest signal yet that the Communist Party leadership has decided to reverse its policy of permitting creeping freedoms in the Baltics and is now ready to set limits.

Policy of Tolerance

Moscow’s policy of tolerance toward the Baltic states, backed by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, included allowing the region virtual economic independence and responding cautiously even in the face of declarations from the republics’ parliaments that Soviet law is secondary to local law.

The gambit, risky from the start, was intended to dissuade Balts from seeking to leave the union.

But the tactic increasingly appears to be failing. Rhetoric has become more radical from the Baltic activists, who have called for an outright break with the Soviet Union.

More than 2 million people in the Baltics have signed petitions demanding independence for their republics.

The party declaration would not divert Baltic activists from the drive for independence, according to Ulo Kaevats of the Estonian People’s Front.

The message “won’t have any particular effect because it doesn’t include any concrete steps,” the Associated Press quoted Kaevats as saying. “I see it as an expression of weakness and of a policy that is not very rational.”

Ethnic Russians living in the Baltics, complaining of discrimination, have responded to the independence drive with strikes and counter-movements.

“Things have gone far. The fate of the Baltic peoples is in serious danger,” the Central Committee said. “People should know into what abyss they are being pushed by their nationalist leaders.

“The consequences could be disastrous for the people if the nationalists manage to attain their goals,” the toughly worded statement continued. “The very viability of the Baltic nations could be called into question.”

The declaration, which called on all Balts “to realize the full extent and reality of the impending disaster,” came just three days after up to 2 million people joined hands in a giant human chain across the Baltics.

The joint demonstration was held to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of a Soviet-German nonaggression pact which led to the occupation of the then-independent Baltic states by Soviet Army troops. The republics were subsequently annexed by the Soviet Union.

Although Soviet police did not interfere with the demonstrators, the Central Committee statement held out the possibility that in the future, protesters would meet a harsher response, particularly those seeking a break with the union.

‘Mass Street Clashes’

It warned that a threat had arisen of “civil conflict and mass street clashes” that would “involve grave consequences.”

The statement clearly sought to isolate the nationalist leaders, saying: “Soviet people across the country watched and read with astonishment and bitterness about things that in no way agreed with what they knew of Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian national traditions and would appear insulting to the national character of a people known for their honesty, sober-mindedness and respect for standards of civilized human relationship.”

It said the positions espoused by nationalist leaders have become “more and more openly extremist and separatist” and criticized “the anti-socialist, anti-Soviet nature of their schemes.”

The nationalist leaders, the declaration said, attempted on the anniversary of the Soviet-German pact to “fan emotions to a point of actual nationalist hysteria. Slogans foisted upon thousands of people were full of animosity toward the Soviet system, Russian people, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Army.”

Slogans on signs posted in the capitals of the Baltic republics last week included: “Down with Communism” and “Red Army Go Home.” Nationalist groups sold buttons showing the Nazi swastika on the Soviet flag.

‘Negative Tendencies’

The Central Committee statement also singled out Communist Party leaders in the republics, saying they had “failed to stem the negative tendencies, to redress the situation, to uphold principled positions. . . . Some even began to play up to nationalist sentiments.”

The Communist Party leadership in the Baltics, in fact, has become increasingly independent from Moscow. In Lithuania, for example, a party commission investigating the controversial Soviet-German pact of 1939 went further than a Soviet Parliament commission in denouncing the pact and argued that the situation in the Baltics should be returned to its 1939 conditions--in other words, independence should be restored to the republics.