Kremlin Asks Stronger Powers to Quell Unrest : Soviet Union: Baltic republics fear the law will permit the government to abuse its authority.

The Soviet government, seeking to contain the country’s continuing ethnic unrest and social discontent, Monday asked for legal authority to assume sweeping emergency powers when it deems it necessary.

Veniamin Yakovlev, the justice minister, told members of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s Parliament, that they should enact strong new laws that give the government the right to act immediately in emergency situations, particularly to curb the now frequent public disorders and increasing ethnic violence.

Warning that large numbers of people have been endangered by the recent violence, Yakovlev contended that the government, in upholding a “state based on law,” needs broader legal authority to protect them and take actions that had, until now, been largely political decisions by Communist Party leaders.

But the government’s proposal, so encompassing that it would allow central authorities to take over the government of any of the country’s 15 constituent republics or any other region despite promises of greater independence, drew immediate resistance from deputies from the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Marju Lauristin, a leading Estonian politician, told other deputies that the legislation must be amended to include “a mechanism for preventing any groundless declaration of a state of emergency and abuse of power when it is in force.”

She was joined in the heated debate by many other deputies objecting to the sweeping powers that the law would give the government and insisting on legislative checks.

Under the bill, authorities could use their emergency powers to detain people without trial for up to 30 days, to place them under house arrest, to deport non-residents from an area, to ban demonstrations, rallies and strikes, to restrict communications and movements, to dismiss the directors of government institutes and factories and to abolish groups that do not have legal status.

The draft also permits the Presidium, or leadership, of the Supreme Soviet to give additional powers as needed to any special administrative bodies established during the state of emergency.

But the bill’s full import was far from clear, other deputies noted, because of pending constitutional amendments that would create an executive presidency and transfer many government powers to it.

The proposed law was part of a legislative package intended to strengthen the government’s ability to deal with not only political and ethnic unrest but mounting crime and widespread social discontent.

The powers requested by the government appeared to many legislators to be far too broad and lacking any controls, but government officials argued that, in setting limits and in replacing a system of government solely by Communist Party decisions, they represent a substantial effort to transform the country into “a law-based state.”

Another bill in the package would allow the government to seek court orders banning groups that stir up ethnic animosity or that are fascist in character and would broaden present legislation by making activities that arouse such animosity a crime.

Other bills would strengthen the country’s internal security forces, now manned by conscripts, by transforming them into professional troops who would be better trained and better paid and define when they would be allowed to use firearms and other weapons.

“The additional outlays will be recovered many times over,” one deputy, Vladislav Shapovalenko, said in support of these laws. “It is immoral to call up our 18-year-old sons and grandsons to restore order inside the country. This is something that well-trained soldiers should do.”

Yakovlev, speaking to the Council of the Union, one of the Supreme Soviet’s two chambers, argued that the proposed law was more a restriction on the government’s actions--in the past, Soviet authorities had simply acted as they believed necessary without regard to the law--than a license to do as it wished.

The present Soviet constitution permits the Presidium to declare a state of emergency, Yakovlev pointed out, but there is no legislation specifying what powers the authorities may assume and how long they may keep them.

The government, as a result, now tends to do nothing as the various conflicts around the country grow into crises, Yakovlev said, until it finally acts--and overreacts with measures that are far too harsh.

“The importance of this legislation is confirmed by recent tragic events in our country,” Yuri Golik, a member of the Supreme Soviet’s legal affairs committee, said, referring to the ethnic violence in Armenia and Azerbaijan last month and then in Tadzhikistan. “Its urgent adoption would allow us to avert many tragedies.”

In Azerbaijan, the republic’s government refused last month to declare a state of emergency in Baku, the capital, as mobs continued to attack and kill Armenians. President Mikhail S. Gorbachev eventually pushed the measure through the Presidium so that troops could be sent into the city to end the pogroms, in which more than 70 Armenians died. In that process, the death toll rose to more than 200.

The bill, which received preliminary approval but must go through several more legislative stages before a final vote, provides for roughly the same powers that the Presidium gave the government when a state of emergency was declared in sections of the southern Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan.