Multiparty System Is Legalized by Lithuania

Rebel Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to legalize a multiparty system today in its most extreme act of defiance against Moscow to date.

The Baltic republic’s Parliament threw out a constitutional article guaranteeing the Communist Party’s leading role and legalized other parties and movements.

The decision was likely to anger the Kremlin, which has opposed calls for a multiparty system. It could also spur similar defiance in other republics and encourage deputies who want to remove the same article from the Soviet constitution.

Human rights activist Andrei D. Sakharov and other deputies have called a two-hour strike Monday to back demands for the Congress of People’s Deputies, the top legislative body, to discuss that article when it convenes Tuesday.

The Lithuanian Supreme Soviet, or Parliament, voted 243 to 1 to dump Article 6 and replace it with a clause allowing political parties, public organizations and movements, provided they operate within Lithuanian law. There were 39 abstentions.

Before the vote, deputies said they would merely be legalizing the many parties and movements that have already sprung up in the Baltic republic in the past 14 months.

“This issue has long been solved for all Lithuania,” Deputy Romualdas Ozolas told the Parliament, according to a Lithuanian journalist who was present at the session. “It is only the Supreme Soviet that has not yet made the decision.”

Ozolas, a Communist who is also a member of the Lithuanian mass movement Sajudis, said he recognized that most members of Parliament are Communists and hated to give up an article guaranteeing the party’s supremacy.

“But we should make a distinction between being a party member and being a deputy,” he said.

Sajudis is the most popular of the political organizations that have come to life in Lithuania as it led demands among outlying Soviet republics for more autonomy from Moscow.

Last March, Sajudis candidates won the majority of seats in the Moscow Parliament representing Lithuania. Lithuania also has Christian Democratic and Social Democratic parties and a Greens movement.

Lithuania is preparing for local and republic elections Feb. 24. Today’s decision made it likely they would be the first multiparty elections in the Soviet Union since 1917, when several parties contested seats in a Constituent Assembly.

The Bolsheviks, who won fewer seats than their rivals, the Socialist Revolutionaries, dissolved the assembly by force in January, 1918.

Lithuanian journalists said the Parliament had not been influenced by recent decisions in East Germany and Czechoslovakia to abolish the Communist Party’s leading role.

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, while tolerating such changes in Eastern Europe, has consistently rejected introducing a multiparty system at home for the moment although he has not flatly ruled it out for all time.

In response to calls for a discussion of the Soviet constitution’s Article 6, Gorbachev has said this could be done as part of a comprehensive review of the entire constitution in light of recent changes in Soviet society, but he has warned against haste.