UPHEAVAL IN THE SOVIET BLOC : Reformer Elected Lithuania’s President

Algirdas Brazauskas, the charismatic leader of the Lithuanian Communist Party, was elected president of Lithuania on Monday--a strong vote of confidence in his defiant assertion of the Soviet republic’s desire for independence.

Brazauskas, 57, was elected by a vote of 228 to 4 with 19 abstentions in the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet, the Baltic republic’s legislature, according to Tass, the official Soviet news agency. He succeeds Vytautas Astrauskas, 59, who resigned because of poor health.

Although two candidates of the Lithuanian Sajudis nationalist movement were also nominated, Brazauskas’ popularity ensured his election.

Brazauskas, who has been first secretary of the Lithuanian party since October, 1988, strongly supported its decision last month to break from the Soviet Communist Party and seek the restoration of Lithuania’s sovereignty.

Despite warnings from Moscow that this split--the first real break from the Soviet Communist Party since the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917--would undercut President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his reform program, Brazauskas passionately defended the move as Gorbachev argued for its reversal in Lithuania last week.

Brazauskas’ election as president had been planned in order to strengthen his position in dealing with Moscow by dramatizing the personal support he has and by giving him additional stature as head of the state as well as the party.

The step also ensures that if the Soviet Communist Party should expel Brazauskas in an attempt to halt the Lithuanian pullout, as demanded by conservative members of its policy-making Central Committee, he will still be president of Lithuania.

Brazauskas, an engineer, worked on a number of major construction projects in Lithuania before becoming the republic’s construction minister in 1967, then first deputy chairman of the government planning commission and later a party secretary overseeing the republic’s economy.

As Sajudis began in mid-1988 to organize Lithuanians into one of the strongest political movements in the Soviet Union outside the Communist Party, Brazauskas began to reposition the Lithuanian party to respond to the same popular demands for national sovereignty, economic autonomy, environmental protection and greater democracy.

Since taking over the party leadership from men opposed even to Gorbachev’s more gradual reform, Brazauskas has put Lithuania in the forefront of the Soviet Union’s political and economic transformation as well as pursuing Lithuanians’ dream of recovering their independence.