Lithuanians OK Ending Top Role for Communists

Lawmakers in the Soviet Baltic republic of Lithuania, rebelling further against Kremlin rule, voted Thursday to abolish the constitutional provision guaranteeing the Communist Party the leading political role there and authorized the formation of competing parties.

The legislative action echoes recent moves in Eastern Europe to strip Communist parties of an automatic right to rule, and it clears the way for re-establishment of a multiparty political system in Lithuania, which was absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1940 after a brief two decades of independence.

The move will also greatly increase pressure on the Kremlin to include multi-party democracy in President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s power-sharing reforms, which many radicals feel must be taken much further if they are to succeed in reshaping the country.

But Lithuania’s action is certain to provoke an angry protest by the central leadership, which is strongly opposed to any change in the party’s constitutional status as the “leading and guiding force of Soviet society,” as the Soviet Union’s federal constitution puts it.

Central authorities may consequently declare it unconstitutional, as they have done with a number of other steps taken by Lithuania, the neighboring Baltic republics of Estonia and Latvia and the southern republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia to proclaim their political autonomy.

Lithuania had been warned last week by Vadim A. Medvedev, a member of the party’s ruling Politburo, against any further “stepping up of attempts to weaken or even to break the republic’s ties with the center” for such separatism could lead to “tragic consequences.”

The Lithuanian amendments nevertheless won overwhelming approval in the republic’s Supreme Soviet, or Parliament, in a dramatic reflection of the rising nationalism, which many Soviet observers fear will lead to an effort to declare its independence from the Soviet Union within a short time.

In their first balloting on the issue, 243 deputies voted to delete from the constitution the provision that had declared “the guiding . . . role of society, state and public organizations belongs to the Communist Party.” Only one deputy voted to retain the language, and 30 abstained.

The lawmakers then voted, 259-0 with 19 abstentions, to substitute new wording that gives “to all parties and organizations equal rights in the framework of the Lithuanian constitution and laws of the republic.”

“This issue has long been solved for all Lithuania,” deputy Romualdas Ozolas, a member both of the Communist Party and the new Sajudis movement, declared during the debate on the amendments. “It is only the Supreme Soviet that has not yet made the decision.”

Most of the lawmakers are also party members and owe their positions, won in uncontested elections several years ago, to the party organization that nominated them. New republican elections are planned for February, and the party knows that it will have great difficulty in winning against Sajudis, which took most of the seats in parliamentary elections last spring.

Albertas Laurincukas, another prominent deputy, had argued during the lengthy and often-emotional debate: “Democracy is impossible with a government that results from a constitution that establishes the inequality of parties and the inequality of people who are their members.”

The amendments also look toward the likelihood that the Lithuanian Communist Party will declare itself independent of the Soviet party later this month when it holds a congress in Vilnius, the capital. That move is also strongly opposed by the party leadership in Moscow.

The Lithuanian action is likely to encourage several other of the Soviet Union’s 15 constituent republics to proceed with similar changes in their constitutions. In Armenia, similar legislation failed to win passage earlier this week when a quorum was not present.

The Communist Party’s constitutional role is also an increasingly controversial issue on a national level as the country’s one-party system is openly challenged from the left with demands for repeal of Article 6 of the Soviet constitution.

A narrow majority of lawmakers in the national Supreme Soviet voted to make the party’s status a question for open debate next week at the Congress of People’s Deputies, the country’s national assembly, but top officials ruled there had not been a quorum present, and no second vote was taken.

A small group of radical lawmakers, led by Andrei D. Sakharov, a nuclear physicist and Nobel Peace laureate, is now attempting to organize a “symbolic” two-hour strike, modeled on that in Czechoslovakia recently, to protest the party’s constitutionally guaranteed role in politics.

Word of the protest, planned for 10 a.m. Monday, is spreading through the country, according to the newsletter Glasnost, which follows opposition politics closely, but whether such a small and informal group can organize an effective mass protest in so large a country remains uncertain.

“It is of great importance that Article 6 of the constitution be abandoned,” Sakharov was quoted as saying by the Soviet news bulletin Interfax. “We cannot afford to bob about in the wake of changes that are taking place in Eastern Europe.”

Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland, all of which had minor opposition parties, have now abolished their Communist parties’ constitutionally privileged positions, and Bulgarian officials say it may also be discussed there.

On the closing day of the last session of the Congress of People’s Deputies in June, Sakharov had called for the elimination of Article 6 so that competing political parties could develop, but Gorbachev cut his speech short and has repeatedly defended the “constitutionality” of the provision in the last six months.

But Anatoly Lukyanov, Gorbachev’s deputy, and Yevgeny M. Primakov, another alternate member of the ruling Politburo, told a press conference here this week that the party leadership hopes that its own reform efforts will outpace the demands for a multi-party system, which they see as distracting people from the resolution of actual problems and diverting them into pure politics.

“The role of the party is changing, and perhaps it will one day be necessary to make changes, but only through a constitutional process,” Primakov said. “This is not the only article of the constitutional that may be changed.

“As for the party’s leading role, it is extremely important that this be maintained throughout perestroika, not only because the party was the initiator of perestroika but also because it is the only force capable of consolidating the process.”

Lithuania Responds

The Supreme Soviet in Moscow has voted to allow Lithuania and the other Baltic republics to develop a market-oriented economy starting next year. The Lithuanian parliament voted Dec. 7 to abolish the political supremacy of the Communist Party written into its constitution and legalize a multi-party system.