Soviets Break Into Deserters’ Refuge, Seize Lithuanians : Secession: Hospital invaded. Troops also take over Communist Party headquarters in breakaway republic.

Armed Soviet paratroopers broke into a psychiatric hospital here before dawn today to arrest about 20 army deserters who had taken shelter there after Lithuania declared itsindependence two weeks ago from the Soviet Union, government officials said.

Other soldiers, all heavily armed, took over the headquarters of the independent Lithuanian Communist Party in Vilnius in a sharp escalation of tensions in the capital of the breakaway Baltic republic.

“The situation is extremely tense,” a party official said. “We have been virtually occupied by the army. There are troops and guns everywhere. We have been taken over.”

The military action seems likely to shatter the optimism, engendered only on Monday, that a political solution could be found in the crisis over Lithuania’s determination to secede from the Soviet Union.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, seeking to ease the tensions, had repeated assurances Monday that the Kremlin would not seek to subjugate Lithuania by force, and Lithuanian politicians and Soviet generals had reached an agreement intended to avoid confrontations.

Two truckloads of paratroopers, armed with AK-47 assault rifles and wearing camouflage uniforms, arrived at the Vilnius psychiatric hospital about 3:30 a.m. today, according to hospital personnel, and charged through the building to the second-floor ward where 26 deserters had taken refuge.

Some of the youths, who had quit their units in the Soviet army complaining of harassment and brutality, resisted arrest, according to doctors and nurses on duty, and there was a brief but bloody battle with several of the deserters dragged away, leaving a trail of blood down the hospital stairs and out into the street.

Two Lithuanian police officers were also beaten when they attempted to intervene, according to a spokesman at the Lithuanian Interior Ministry. Two of the soldiers appeared to have been badly injured, he said.

The ward where the deserters had been sheltered under Red Cross protection was torn apart in the melee, according to hospital personnel, with doors battered down, iron beds broken and windows smashed. Film shot by an American television crew of the incident was seized at gunpoint.

A few of the young men, perhaps as many as 15, managed to escape, however, as nurses led them out back entrances of the hospital.

Paratroopers also entered the Red Cross Hospital in Kaunas, 65 miles west of Vilnius, and interrogated deserters there, but left without arresting any of the youths sheltering there, according to ministry spokesmen.

Soviet military authorities had warned that they would arrest soldiers who had deserted from their units if they did not return voluntarily by last Saturday. The Lithuanian government had offered sanctuary to the deserters but found later that it had little way of honoring that commitment.

In central Vilnius, soldiers surrounded the headquarters of the Lithuanian Communist Party at 7:30 a.m. as officials began coming to work and swiftly took over the building.

No explanation was given for the action, party officials inside said by telephone. “We are sitting in our offices, and the soldiers with their guns are outside our doors and up and down the corridors,” an official said. “It is like we have been captured. We have no idea what will happen. The situation is very tense.”

Over the weekend, Soviet troops had occupied several party buildings, saying they were doing so on instructions from a faction of the Lithuanian party that had remained loyal to Moscow when three-quarters of the party broke its ties in December.

The storming of the deserters’ refuge came a day after Gorbachev repeated his assurance that the Kremlin will not seek to subjugate Lithuania by force.

In a meeting with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Gorbachev moved to cool the Lithuania crisis, saying that the Kremlin has shunned “Cold War methods” for good.

But he also betrayed some vexation with the West’s worries about the situation, telling his visitor that the West is trying to milk Lithuania’s secession for political gain and taking a swipe at the United States for finding logic to justify its interventions in Panama and other foreign lands while rejecting steps taken by the Kremlin to keep order at home.

“One’s own actions, even in other countries, are measured by one standard, but the actions of others in their own country are (measured) by other standards and arouse ‘concern,’ ” Gorbachev told the Massachusetts Democrat, according to the official news agency Tass.

In Washington, the Bush Administration continued its rhetorical tightrope walk, trying to sound supportive to the Lithuanians without sounding provocative to the Soviets.

“It is incumbent that both sides maintain open communications,” White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said in a statement. “Neither side should undertake any actions which could preclude negotiations.”

Referring specifically to Lithuania, Gorbachev said the Soviets have given “convincing proofs of our devotion to the new thinking, the policy of renouncing ‘Cold War methods’ and a reliance on force, respect for the right of the peoples to choose and to equal security.”

Gorbachev’s conciliatory remarks were published hours after Lithuanian leaders reached a key agreement with Soviet officers to create a committee to discuss how to prevent conflicts between the estimated 30,000 soldiers garrisoned in the republic and its 3.7 million residents.

Both that accord, reached in Vilnius, and the switch in Gorbachev’s tone heralded the first easing in the war of nerves waged by the Kremlin since the republic’s March 11 declaration of independence. And Lithuania’s leader at the Vilnius talks saw a break in the political storm clouds.

“After coming out of the meeting today, I can see that the mood has changed,” Deputy Prime Minister Romualdas Ozolas told a news conference. “It is evident the conflict will not be escalated.”

Those were welcome words in the Baltic land, which spent a nerve-racking 48 hours over the weekend as more than 100 Soviet military vehicles rumbled through the heart of Vilnius, helicopters swirled overhead and paratroopers occupied four Communist Party buildings on orders, they said, “to protect them.”

State-run television also did its part Monday night to soothe tensions, reporting that war games planned long ago were the reason the Soviet army suddenly assumed a high profile in Lithuania. And it assured gun owners that their firearms would only be impounded temporarily under last Wednesday’s order from Gorbachev.

Though upbeat, Ozolas said his talks had not yielded what the Lithuanians have been persistently seeking: a clear commitment from the Soviets to negotiate the terms of independence, including who gets the $83 billion in investments that one Moscow newspaper said were made in a half-century of Soviet rule.

“This isn’t the beginning of negotiations,” Ozolas said. “These are small steps toward negotiations.”

He also said that Lithuanians still need to be vigilant.

“I think it is safe to say that we have passed the most dangerous period, but the army and the CPSU (Soviet Communist Party) are working together, and there is no reason for us to let down our guard,” the deputy prime minister said.

As if to prove Ozolas right, helicopters continued to whir through the skies of Vilnius, dumping loads of Russian-language leaflets that accused the republic’s leadership of “pushing the Lithuanian nation into an abyss of uncertainty.” They called on Lithuanians to demonstrate against the independence declaration.

Gorbachev, who has opposed Lithuanian secession as illegal, showed no changes in that stance in his remarks to Kennedy. He said he would wield power as Soviet president “to defend democracy and glasnost (openness), to ensure the rule of law and constitutional order, to prevent the weakening of the state and stop militant actions that can provoke much trouble.”

But overall, the Soviet leader’s comments were not as brusque as the directives he issued last week demanding that Lithuanians hand over all firearms, stop signing up for a voluntary police auxiliary and abandon an unlawful drive for secession.

Gorbachev on Monday also held out the promise of a “just solution” once a law can be passed codifying procedures for secession by any of the 15 Soviet republics. The Lithuanians, whose homeland was independent from 1918 until the Kremlin absorbed it by force in 1940, say that the Soviets have no legal claims on them.

Ozolas and Lithuanian Interior Minister Marijonas Misiukonis met with Col. Viktor Smokarev, deputy chief of the Vilnius military garrison, and Col. Vladimir Trikov of the Soviet Interior Ministry, which handles law enforcement affairs and has its own troops.

Ozolas said that both groups pledged not to take action affecting security without informing the other and agreed to the formation of the coordinating group to exchange information.

The military, he said, complained of the alleged beating of a soldier and of shots being fired from a moving car that missed other military personnel. He said those incidents are being investigated.

The Lithuanians, for their part, want to know why military aircraft keep buzzing their cities, why armored columns have moved through the streets and who ordered the takeover of the party buildings.

No answers were immediately forthcoming, and Lithuania’s president, Vytautas Landsbergis, even questioned Monday night how scrupulously the Soviet army would observe the accord.

He told a Vilnius news conference that in Kaunas, about 60 miles to the northwest, gun-toting soldiers entered a former political education institute without warning despite the military’s earlier promise to give advance notice of movements.

There were also reports in Vilnius, according to the Associated Press, that paratroopers had occupied another building, the Communist Party committee’s headquarters in the port of Klaipeda, 200 miles northwest of Vilnius.

Asked specifically if the Soviet army’s takeover of buildings in Vilnius constituted a “use of force,” Fitzwater said in Washington:

“It’s not a use of a kind of military force that threatens lives. It is certainly a kind of force, and we would be opposed to any kind of use of force, without trying to pass judgment on any specific action.”

Landsbergis, a bespectacled professor of music history who led a successful two-year campaign for the independence proclamation, struck a more pessimistic note than Ozolas about Moscow’s apparent willingness now to deal. “I can’t be so optimistic regarding cooperation in this field,” Landsbergis said.

The Lithuanian deputy prime minister said earlier that “there are very clear offers to finally have contact.”

Kennedy said after his talks with Gorbachev that the Kremlin leader reiterated that he has no intention of using force to compel Lithuania to return to the Soviet fold.

“President Gorbachev indicated to me that the position of the Soviet Union was that there would be no use of force unless the lives of others were threatened and that he was committed to a peaceful resolution,” Kennedy told a news conference.

The senator said that Gorbachev did not specify whose lives might be at risk in Lithuania, or whether he thought such threats were likely.

Official Soviet media have repeatedly expressed concern for the fate of the 20% of Lithuania’s population that is non-Lithuanian, including its 9% ethnic Russian minority.

Times staff writer Dahlburg reported from Moscow, and Schrader, a free-lance journalist, reported from Vilnius. Times staff writer David Lauter, in Washington, also contributed to this report.