Soviet Party Leaders to Campaign Among Restive Lithuanians : Dissent: Gorbachev and others from Moscow hope to talk with most of the 200,000 Communists in the Baltic republic to dissuade them from breaking away.

Leaders of the Soviet Communist Party, in their efforts to dissuade Lithuanian Communists from breaking away to form an independent party, plan to talk with virtually all of the 200,000 members of the Lithuanian party next month in a massive political campaign.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet party’s general secretary, will lead an unprecedented peace mission that is expected to include virtually all the other members of the ruling Politburo and party Secretariat and most of the 250-member, policy-making Central Committee.

Just after the New Year’s holiday, the leaders will begin to fan out through each of Lithuania’s 92 cities and towns and 44 rural districts, according to senior party sources, for a series of meetings that will give the leadership a firsthand opportunity to hear why the Lithuanian Communists want to become independent of the parent party as well as a chance to put forth Moscow’s argument for continued integration.

Gorbachev himself is to meet with party members in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, and in Kaunas, the old capital, the sources said, and those discussions are likely to set the tone for the whole mission.

He is also expected to go to the heavily Russian area near the Baltic coast around the Ignalina nuclear power plant and to some of the republic’s Polish districts. The independence move has been opposed by both Russians and Poles.

The visits, which are likely to continue for at least two weeks and end with a major meeting of Lithuanian party members and the Soviet leadership in Vilnius, are aimed at reaching a compromise that will keep the Lithuanian Communists within the Soviet party but with full autonomy.

The Central Committee will then resume its meeting, broken off after two days of stormy debate, and reconsider the issue. This session might become part of another Central Committee meeting, planned for late January, that will focus on the future of the party, including its basic philosophy and organization, and on new directions for the country.

“Mikhail Gorbachev will command enormous respect and exert great authority on the spot in Lithuania,” a Central Committee official said, explaining the decision to send Gorbachev and other top party officials to Lithuania. “But he will have to answer directly to many Lithuanian Communists who have very sharp questions.”

The Lithuanian Communists declared their independence from the Soviet party earlier this month in the first such division in the party since it came to power in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Without such independence, they believe they stand little chance of retaining power in the republic in the multi-party elections to be held there in two months.

Their challenge to the Soviet leadership, however, calls into question not only the unity of the party but also, in time, the unity of the Soviet state--and as a result it has thrust the country into a major political crisis, the outcome of which is highly uncertain.

“This is a struggle to save perestroika (Gorbachev’s political and economic restructuring), nothing less,” a senior Central Committee official commented. “The Lithuanian move is seen as the first step toward schism, and as such it is a heavy blow to Mikhail Gorbachev . . . . Very much, really everything, is now at stake in Lithuania, and we must make a maximum effort if we are to preserve perestroika and move ahead.”

The mission will work on two political levels at once--persuading the Lithuanians to remain within the Soviet party in order to preserve and develop Gorbachev’s reforms and convincing conservatives and even some liberals from outside Lithuania of the need to reshape the party to meet the people’s needs there.

Top party leaders believe, these officials say, that many Lithuanians will rethink their decision to establish an independent party once they realize the implications of that move for themselves and the rest of the Soviet Union, when they are reassured of Gorbachev’s commitment to broaden his reforms and give them full autonomy and when they are free from local nationalist pressure.

“We will try to create a situation in which people can freely state their views without fear and without pressure,” an official said. “If they remain determined to break away, then we have a new, more profound dilemma, one for which we do not yet have an answer.

“We know, however, that it is absolutely impossible to force a solution. Only a democratic decision, taken within a normal political struggle, can resolve this crisis.”