Gorbachev Tells ‘Concern, Alarm’ on Lithuania : East Bloc: The Soviet leader calls an urgent meeting to discuss his nation’s latest political crisis.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, confronted by the decision of Communists in the Soviet Baltic republic of Lithuania to form an independent party, Thursday called an urgent meeting of the Soviet Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee to discuss the country’s latest political crisis.

Gorbachev, speaking to the Congress of People’s Deputies, the Soviet Parliament, made clear the gravity with which the party leadership views the challenge from Lithuania, whose break with Moscow shatters the unity through which the Soviet Communist Party has ruled for more than 70 years.

Reading a note from deputies who described the Lithuanian decision as “a new turn in a separatist tendency in the country and an enormous new danger for the Soviet Communist Party and the multinational Soviet state,” Gorbachev told Parliament, “We share this concern and alarm.”

The Soviet party’s ruling Politburo, underscoring the severity of the crisis, decided Thursday to convene a special session of the Central Committee in Moscow within a few days.

In a message to the Lithuanian party congress, which is still meeting in Vilnius, the capital of the republic, the Politburo described the move as “a step aimed at splitting” the two parties and thus of national concern.

Delegates to the Lithuanian congress had voted, 855 to 160, on Wednesday to declare their party “an independent political organization with its own program and statutes,” no longer subordinate to the Soviet party and with the goal of re-establishing Lithuania as a “democratic and independent state.”

The Soviet leadership now fears similar challenges from other restive Soviet republics, including Armenia, Georgia, Estonia and Latvia, and greater difficulty in preserving the country’s unity as ethnic as well as political and social tensions continue to grow.

In a further complication, the 160 delegates who voted against independence for the Lithuanian party broke with the majority Thursday to form a group that will remain within the Soviet Communist Party.

Juozas Kuolialis, one of the organizers, said in Vilnius that he believes that about 50,000 Communists, a quarter of the party’s membership in Lithuania, will remain with the Soviet party.

“We believe that the Lithuanian Communist Party gave in to pressure from opposition forces in the republic,” he said, attributing this week’s developments to the growing strength of the Sajudis, the Lithuanian national movement, which includes many Communists but transcends party lines in its campaign for an independent Lithuania. “In our view, the Communist Party’s leadership in Lithuania has become a tool in the hands of Sajudis.”

Gorbachev told the Congress of People’s Deputies in Moscow that he had received many telegrams and letters from Communists around the country who saw the Lithuanian move as threatening the disintegration of the Soviet party, which had abolished all factions within its ranks in 1920, three years after the Bolshevik Revolution, and that he, too, believed the issue to be of paramount importance.

Yegor K. Ligachev, a senior Politburo member, had earlier described the Lithuanian move as bringing “great trouble for the people and for Communists.” The Lithuanians “just do not realize yet what grief will descend,” Ligachev warned.

The Central Committee meeting could hold special perils for Gorbachev by affording party conservatives a new issue with which to attack him and with a major forum in which to do so.

Only two weeks ago, Gorbachev encountered particularly sharp criticism from conservatives at the last regular Central Committee meeting--some radicals described the session as a “political ambush” against him--and Gorbachev responded with a warning that he would resign if he lost the committee’s support.

Conservatives, many of them powerful regional leaders who see their authority diminished by the country’s political reforms but some of whom have themselves won office as a result of the changes, have increasingly criticized Gorbachev’s policies as ill-considered, taking the nation too far, too fast and requiring a full-scale reassessment.

Describing the Central Committee meeting at which Gorbachev successfully faced his critics down, the liberal writer Daniil Granin wrote of the session, which he had attended as a guest:

“Here for the first time, from the mouths of regional party leaders, I heard direct accusations against Mikhail Gorbachev that his line was wrong and that ‘it is time for all of us to take the correct road’.”

A commentator, Valery Vyzhutovich, for the government newspaper Izvestia said the meeting had been characterized by “calls by some for ‘a clear assessment of where we are heading’ and an expression of loyalty to socialist ideals.”

These criticisms could well arise again during the Central Committee’s debate over the Lithuanian move.

Gorbachev could be reproached by conservatives for allowing Lithuanian Communists to go as far as they have without their drive for independence being halted. With Marxism barely an echo in the new program of the Lithuanian Communist Party and communism not even mentioned among the party’s goals, he might again be held responsible for the country’s ideological drift.

But Lithuanian party officials in Vilnius said Thursday evening that they expected that the only question on the agenda of the meeting would be whether the Soviet Communist Party will recognize the new party, and--despite the initial anger in Moscow--they and others in Vilnius were betting that the answer would be yes.

“They can quarrel with the way we did it, perhaps--not enough discussion, not enough consultation, prematurely and so forth--but not with what we did, which was make ourselves relevant to our people and our situation,” a senior party official said, asking not to be quoted by name before the Lithuanian leadership could issue a formal response.

Gorbachev is promoting a new governmental system for the Soviet Union based on federalism, but he has insisted on a unified party under strong central leadership. A federalized party, he has warned, would quickly collapse into competing nationalist groups unable to formulate policies for the country as a whole.