Save Them From the Angry Czar : Lithuania: To support <i> perestroika</i> is to support those Soviet nations that have taken the “new thinking” to heart. America must recognize this Baltic land’s independence.

If Mikhail Gorbachev succeeds in smothering Lithuania, Americans will have no one to blame but themselves.

Push has come to shove in the Baltic. The Lithuanian Parliament, as representative a legislative body as there ever was, asserted the popular will and passed a declaration of independence--not because of something as trifling as taxation without representation, but because of 50 years of political repression, economic mismanagement, cultural stultification, perhaps even genocide. Lithuanians view the Soviet Union with the same emotional intensity as do Jews when they contemplate Nazi Germany, or as blacks think of South Africa. And, for better or for worse, they all draw the same conclusion: that historically criminal regimes are deserving only of unequivocal condemnation and replacement.

Gorbachev’s position is equally uncompromising. As the titular head of the world’s last empire, he must follow in the footsteps of the czars and resist the disintegration of his realm. Gorbachev knows, as do the non-Russians, that to permit the Lithuanians to escape Moscow’s clutches is not only to invite other non-Russian republics to follow suit; worse still, it is to deprive the Soviet Union of its last vestige of legitimacy by exposing it as a coercive imperial polity and not as a budding democracy and state ruled by law.

Can talks, negotiations or discussion resolve such an impasse? Alas, no. There is no room for compromise over sovereignty. Either a nation has it or it does not. Dual sovereignty, as Lenin realized, is an inherently unstable condition. At some point, one side must prevail over the other.

In the past, Moscow has never hesitated to subordinate non-Russian aspirations for independence to its own imperial ambitions. It seized the Ukraine, the Transcaucasus and Central Asia in 1918-1921, helped Hitler smash Poland in 1939, annexed the Baltic states in 1940 and invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. International indifference facilitated these takeovers in the past. Now only international intervention in the empire’s “internal affairs” can prevent Gorbachev from crushing independent Lithuania. As he is especially dependent on American goodwill, only Washington can tilt the balance in the Lithuanians’ favor.

Unfortunately, the United States has maneuvered itself into an untenable position. By failing to understand that non-Russian separatism is the direct consequence of Gorbachev’s policies, Washington’s perceptions of its own policy options are grounded in a false dichotomy between perestroika and the non-Russians’ right to self-determination. But supporting Gorbachev’s brand of restructuring means supporting those Soviet nations that have taken the “new thinking” to heart and rationally concluded that they would be better off abandoning a politically disintegrating, economically stifling and morally reprehensible empire and joining post-Communist Eastern Europe.

It is because of this flawed understanding of the nature of perestroika that Washington committed two blunders that will haunt it in the weeks to come. By suggesting that it might be acceptable for the Soviet Union to intervene in Romania, the United States recognized Moscow’s continued hegemony in Eastern Europe. And by hailing the Soviet invasion of Azerbaijan, Washington unwittingly granted Moscow the excuse it needs to crack down on Lithuania. Moscow can now argue that Lithuania, like Romania, is in its own back yard, and that an outbreak of interethnic violence in Lithuania would also justify the forcible reimposition of “law and order.”

Although it is hard to see why a consistently peaceful national movement with a gentle musicologist as president should suddenly turn violent, it is far easier to imagine a deliberate provocation by some of Lithuania’s resident Russians or by the KGB. Soviet television’s continued depiction of Lithuania as a country on the brink of anarchy and bloodshed suggests that this may be the scenario Gorbachev has in mind.

There is, thus, only one way to save the Lithuanians from an angry czar. Washington should recognize Lithuanian independence immediately, tell Moscow that the democratic promise of perestroika is incompatible with imperial rule and guarantee all of the Soviet Union’s successor states political and economic aid in return for decolonization.

Lithuania would thus be made a litmus test for Gorbachev--not of his political skills but of his commitment to democracy. Washington would not be remiss in forcing him finally to declare himself: either for empire and against perestroika or against empire and for perestroika. The alternative is to sacrifice all of Moscow’s subject peoples to Gorbachev’s insistence that a democratic empire is a viable vision of the Soviet Union’s future and not just an oxymoron.