Gorbachev Steps In, Warns Baltic Activists to Back Off : Party Daily Also Blasts Moldavians

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has warned officials of the Lithuanian Communist Party that the Baltic republic has gone too far in its drive for independence, an activist said today.

Romaldus Ozolus, a member of the governing council, or Sejm, of the Sajudis grassroots movement, said he and four colleagues met with Lithuanian Communist Party chief Algirdas Brazauskas today after Gorbachev called the Lithuanian party leader on Friday and Sunday to express his concern.

Brazauskas told the Sajudis members “Gorbachev is concerned about what’s happening in Lithuania--that what had happened so far was worth supporting, but that now we’d gone too far,” Olozus said by telephone from the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius.

Ethnic Activists Attacked

In an attack on ethnic activists in another republic, the Communist Party daily newspaper Pravda today accused the People’s Front of Moldavia of trying to “take power on the crest of a muddy wave of chauvinism and separatism.”

On Saturday, the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee in Moscow issued a stinging statement saying separatists were leading the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia into an abyss. The statement came several days after more than 1 million Baltic people joined hands in a human chain to protest the 1939 agreement between Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler that assigned the then-independent Baltics to a Soviet sphere of influence.

The government of Lithuania and the Communist Party of a second Baltic republic, Latvia, came into line today behind the party statement.

Tass press agency said the Latvian party issued a statement calling the party’s stance “the basis for concrete action for normalizing the social-political situation in the country.”

In Lithuania, the Presidium of the republic’s Supreme Soviet legislature rejected a commission’s findings that the incorporation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union by Stalin in 1940 was an “international crime.”

Izvestia, the Soviet government newspaper, said the findings did not take into account Lithuania’s political situation in 1939-40, and would “lead the republic into a political dead end and serve poorly in the transfer to economic independence.”

Olozus said Gorbachev apparently was upset with the findings of the Lithuanian commission because they could heighten the legal argument for full independence.

A meeting of Communist Party activists was called today in Vilnius, but nothing was known of its results.

Olozus said the confrontation with the Kremlin was “inescapable,” but the resistance might slow down the Sajudis-led drive for greater autonomy, if not outright independence from Moscow.

The grassroots movement will continue on the same path, “but the steps can be slower or faster, depending on the concrete situation,” he said.

Sajudis Chairman Vytautus Landsbergis indicated Sunday the harsh Kremlin statement “will make some problems for us.” But he added he didn’t expect the Kremlin to crush the movement. “I don’t think they’re madmen,” he said.