Soviet Party Leadership Censures Breakaway Lithuania Communists : Policy: Action by Central Committee is seen as a relatively mild rebuke. ‘Material and financial’ support is ordered for republic loyalists.

The Soviet Communist Party leadership on Wednesday censured breakaway Lithuanian Communists for “damaging the cause of national renewal” in what was seen here as a relatively mild reaction to a step that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev had previously characterized as “an enormous new danger” to the nation.

A resolution on the final evening of an extraordinary, three-day plenary meeting of the party’s policy-making Central Committee also directed the Politburo headed by Gorbachev to provide “material and financial” support to a smaller group of Lithuanian Communists who have remained loyal to the national party.

But the Soviet party leaders simultaneously issued an almost plaintive call for their breakaway Lithuanian brethren to reconsider their position, urging them to take part in a historic debate on a new, draft party program, also approved Wednesday, that would turn 70 years of Communist dogma on its head.

“The ball is in their court,” Soviet First Vice President Anatoly Lukyanov said at a news conference after the plenary meeting.

Delegates to a Lithuanian party congress last Dec. 20 voted 855 to 160 to declare their party “an independent political organization with its own program and statutes,” no longer subordinate to the Soviet Communist Party and with the goal of re-establishing Lithuania as a “democratic and independent state.”

The action was seen as a desperate attempt by the Lithuanian Communists to establish some credibility with voters before republic-wide elections scheduled in just 16 days, on Feb. 24. The Lithuanian nationalist movement Sajudis, which includes many Communists but transcends party lines in its campaign for an independent Lithuania, is now considered the strongest political force in the republic.

In a multi-ethnic country where the Communist Party has long been seen as the glue holding the constituent republics together, however, the Lithuanian party’s action was immediately interpreted by conservatives as a dangerous first step toward national disintegration.

In a separate action in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius on Wednesday, the republic’s Parliament declared invalid a legislature’s vote in 1940 to join the Soviet Union.

Additional, significant independence movements already exist in the two other Baltic republics, Estonia and Latvia, as well as in Armenia, Georgia, Moldavia and Azerbaijan. Gorbachev is promoting a new federal system of government that would give the republics considerably more autonomy. But he has warned that a federalized party would quickly break up into competing nationalist groups unable to formulate policies for the country as a whole.

An earlier, extraordinary Central Committee session called to deal with the Lithuanian challenge failed despite more than eight hours of marathon debate to agree on a course of action. Last month, Gorbachev visited the republic in what turned out to be a vain attempt to persuade local leaders to cool talk of independence.

Among steps that could have been taken by the Central Committee on Wednesday were to declare the Lithuanian party’s action illegitimate, to denounce the republic party’s leaders, or to expel them from the Soviet party.

In fact, however, short of sending in troops to enforce their will, the national Communist Party actually had very little option but persuasion. In an earlier time, expelling the Lithuanians from the party would have destroyed them politically. But now that independent movements, such as Sajudis, are free to compete in genuine elections, candidates need not be Communist Party members to make a career in government, at least at the republic level.

In Lithuania, in fact, non-Communists probably enjoy a distinct advantage, given pent-up resentment over 50 years of involuntary subjugation to Moscow.

Wednesday’s Central Committee decision was about the mildest of its options available, short of ignoring the challenge completely. Its effect is to postpone any further moves until at least this summer, following a crucial congress of the Soviet Communist Party.

Calling the Lithuanian party’s action “its organizational and political break with the Soviet Communist Party,” the plenum said it “disapproves of such actions” as undermining the party and damaging its perestroika reform program.