Despite Split With Moscow, Defections Sap Lithuanian Communist Party : Soviet Union: With elections due next month, some members see being independent from the national party as their only hope.

When a nervous Alexander N. Varivoda walked into Communist Party headquarters here on a snowy morning a month ago, he was about to end a 10-year commitment by dropping out of the organization he had once so proudly joined.

“When I handed in my membership card, my hands were actually shaking,” the 41-year-old factory worker said. “I had thought about it for a long time, but I was still apprehensive. I knew once I quit, there was no turning back.”

It was far different, he recalled, from the spring day in 1979 when he became the first person in his family to join the party. Then, the party’s first secretary grinned and shook his hand, and his wife hugged him.

“On that day, I was happy,” he said bitterly. “But it seems long ago. Now, I’m finished with the Communist Party for good.”

Throughout the Soviet Union, the list of those joining the Communist Party in the last year has shortened dramatically. Although officials have declined to make public the number of new party members, some say privately it may have reached an all-time low.

In Lithuania, previously staunch Communist Party members are deciding to leave the party by the thousands. The republic’s leaders say it is in part a result of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost , or greater openness, which has permitted free discussion here of how Lithuanians, among other nationalities, were victims of Stalinist era crimes.

In the last year, party officials say, about 6,500 people in Lithuania quit the party, while only about 850 joined.

This is a significant turnaround in a country where Communist Party members traditionally have been viewed as among the most idealistic and powerful and where tombstones list the year the deceased got his party card right next to the year of birth.

A faction of the republic’s Communist Party, representing at least 80% of its 200,000 cardholders, has decided to declare its independence, prompting a crisis with Moscow.

The breakaway group believes the growing unpopularity of Communists in this largest of the three Baltic republics made such a move necessary if the party is to win any seats in February elections to the local congress. They have stressed this point to Gorbachev in a series of meetings and telephone conversations, most recently during a session Thursday in the Kremlin.

Gorbachev reportedly remains unpersuaded and will travel this week to this republic of 3.5 million sandwiched between Poland and Latvia to try to hammer out a compromise to mend the first split in the Communist Party in more than 80 years of Soviet rule.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the daring displayed by the Lithuanian party in declaring its independence has given it a boost in popularity that most political analysts here predict will be visible at the polls.

However, for some, like Varivoda, it is too late.

Varivoda’s grandfather was among those taken away in the middle of the night and killed during the Stalinist purges in the 1940s. Lithuania, along with the other Baltic republics of Latvia and Estonia, was independent until August, 1940, when it was absorbed into the Soviet Union under a secret pact between Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler.

In the years after the loss of independence, tens of thousands of people from the Baltics were deported in massive sweeps, including businessmen, prosperous farmers and any potential political leaders.

“Until glasnost , no one really told me anything about what happened to my grandfather. We were all expected to believe in our party leaders, and we all did,” Varivoda, a tall man who smelled of cigarette smoke, said during a work break in the computer-making factory as he sat playing dominoes with three friends.

“But then, under Gorbachev, we found out about Stalin and about the corruption of other party leaders. Being a cardholding Communist was no longer something to be proud of,” he said.

Varivoda said he began considering quitting the party three years ago but was afraid he would lose his job or that his family would suffer some sort of repercussions.

Last year, the Lithuanian Congress passed a law that stated no punitive measures could be taken against anyone who quit the Communist Party.

“Still, my wife was worried,” Varivoda said. “We spoke about the possibility that I might be fired. Then we decided together that quitting the party was the right thing to do. I wasn’t raised to support corruption and evil.”

Another domino player, Pavel N. Shipkov, also recently handed in his Communist card after eight years as a party member.

“I was approached by the party chief in my plant and asked to join, simply to fulfill the quotas they had that year. I agreed without thinking,” said Shipkov, 30.

“I quickly discovered that even as a party member, the simple worker has no real power here. When my friends asked me why I was a member of the party, I had no good answer,” he said.

“I was afraid to quit at first, because I thought they would take away the communal apartment we live in, which is supplied by the factory. But when I saw my friends quitting and saw nothing was happening to them, I decided I could, too.”

At the factory where Shipkov and Varivoda work, about 10% of all party cardholders have quit in the last year, leaving about 650 party members among 4,000 workers.

These are figures that are particularly alarming to men like Albinas Dastikas, who, as the Communist ideology chief at the plant, serves as a kind of counselor to those suffering from doubts about the worthiness of the party.

Dastikas said that despite many hours of talking, he has been able to persuade only two workers so far not to go ahead with their plans to hand in their membership cards.

“ Glasnost revealed the true character of our leadership, and it was a great blow to the workers,” Dastikas said.

“It even raised some questions in my own mind,” he acknowledged. “But I decided that a man who is not part of the collective is just an empty vessel. And besides, I’m only 40. I still have strength to fight the battle for a better party.”