Soviet Party Fails to Resolve Lithuania Split : Kremlin: Gorbachev works behind the scenes on a compromise. The issue reveals fundamental problems.

The leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, meeting on the crucial issue of party unity, failed to reach agreement Monday despite more than eight hours of marathon debate on how to deal with the unprecedented declaration of independence by the Lithuanian Communist Party.

Although 20 senior party leaders spoke after a report on the situation by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, such deep divisions remained at 8 p.m. that Gorbachev adjourned the meeting overnight, apparently to pursue a compromise privately among the 250 members of the party’s policy-making Central Committee.

The official Soviet news agency Tass provided no details of the debate, reporting only that Gorbachev had presented his analysis, that other party leaders, including those of the Lithuanian party, had spoken, and that the discussion would continue today.

The issue of unity is one of the most difficult that the Soviet Communist Party faces, and the failure to reach a speedy conclusion confirms that fundamental questions are being debated and remain unresolved.

But the unusual deadlock--most Central Committee meetings run according to a strict timetable, and this session was supposed to last half a day--is likely to add to the growing speculation that Gorbachev is having difficulty dealing with party conservatives.

The conservatives tend to blame Gorbachev’s reform policies for most of the country’s problems, and their leading spokesman, Yegor K. Ligachev, a member of the party’s ruling Politburo, was among those who spoke.

Other speakers included Vadim A. Medvedev, the party secretary in charge of ideology; Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, head of the KGB, the Soviet security and intelligence agency, and a number of party leaders from other Soviet republics, including the Ukraine, Estonia and Azerbaijan, each of which has its own nationalist ferment.

Algirdas Brazauskas, the Lithuanian party’s charismatic leader, argued for the Lithuanian position, supported by two other Lithuanian officials but opposed by one of the leaders of a splinter group that has declared its loyalty to the parent Soviet party.

The Lithuanian Communists voted overwhelmingly at a special congress last week to declare their independence from the parent Soviet party in order to seek Lithuanian sovereignty. The Soviet Baltic republic enjoyed a brief period of independence after World War I before it was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940 by the dictator Josef Stalin in an agreement with Nazi Germany’s Adolph Hitler.

The Lithuanian Communists’ break with Moscow is all the more serious for its breach of the Soviet party’s historic emphasis on unity--no factions have been allowed since 1920--and republican parties have always been subordinate to the Soviet party.

Yet Gorbachev apparently feels that he cannot simply invalidate the Lithuanian action. The Lithuanians argue, with considerable evidence, that the party will lose February elections, and thus power, unless it can compete on the basis of independence from Moscow. They have made it plain, moreover, that they will refuse to accept any diktat by the central party leadership.

Gorbachev faces the further danger that, as the Central Committee debates the Lithuanian issue, conservatives will increasingly focus on his policies and his leadership.

Only two weeks ago, he encountered a storm of criticism and was able to silence the conservatives only by warning that he would resign if he lost the confidence of the Central Committee.