Soviets Toughen Secession Rules : Independence: The new law is immediately rejected by representatives of the restive Baltic republics.

With pressures for independence building on the fringes of the Soviet empire, the Soviet legislature overwhelmingly passed a law Tuesday fixing tough requirements for member republics to secede and giving President Mikhail S. Gorbachev sweeping powers to declare states of emergency.

The secession law passed by the Supreme Soviet requires a two-thirds vote by a republic’s residents in a referendum, a five-year transition period for settling property and other questions, approval by the Congress of People’s Deputies in Moscow and payment by the seceding republic of resettlement expenses for those who oppose independence and leave.

The new legislation is a keystone in Gorbachev’s program for what he terms a new “Soviet federation” based not on coercion and force, but on consensus.

But the new secession law was rejected immediately by representatives of the restive Baltic republics, and a representative of the breakaway government of Lithuania called it window dressing for reasserting Moscow’s rule.

“It’s purely decorative--it’s not a law about leaving, but a law about not leaving,” legislator Nikolai Medvedev told a news conference at the Lithuanian delegation offices in the Soviet capital. “It’s an escape valve, but one without an opening.”

The Lithuanians rushed to proclaim independence March 11, in part because they feared that the strictures of a new secession law would be applied to them if they waited. But Gorbachev has rejected their declaration as illegal and demanded that they revoke it, a step the Lithuanians have refused.

After a war of nerves lasting more than three weeks, a compromise suddenly seemed possible Tuesday afternoon when three Lithuanian envoys led by Deputy Prime Minister Romualdas Ozolas were received for talks by Politburo member and key Gorbachev ally Alexander N. Yakovlev at an undisclosed Moscow site.

“You cannot call it a delegation for negotiations; you can call it a goodwill mission,” Lithuania’s representative in Moscow, Egidius Bickauskas, told the reporters gathered at the Lithuanian mission.

It was the first high-level contact between the Lithuanians and Moscow since just after the independence proclamation, and it could portend a negotiated end to a stalemate marked by the occupation of Lithuanian buildings by Soviet troops, the buzzing of cities in the Ireland-sized republic by military planes and other Kremlin strong-arm tactics.

“If there are people who are ready to listen, I think it’s very good,” Bickauskas said.

No details were available on the talks, which the Lithuanians said lasted so long that the news conference called at their mission to discuss the results broke up without Ozolas and the other envoys ever arriving.

Meanwhile, the Polish Foreign Ministry said in Warsaw that Soviet authorities have restricted traffic at Lithuania’s border with Poland, the republic’s only international border. The Polish news agency PAP said Soviet officials informed their Polish counterparts that the crossing from Ogrodniki, Poland, to Lazdijai, Lithuania, was “temporarily” closed.

The secession law, whose provisions were toughened in the final draft, requires that any of the 15 constituent Soviet republics wanting to exercise the right to secede guaranteed by the 1977 Soviet constitution must hold a referendum and win the support of two-thirds of its permanent residents.

During a five-year transition period, negotiations would be held to settle financial, property and other questions--such as who owns factories now under the control of Moscow-based ministries. The Congress of People’s Deputies, the nation’s top parliamentary body, would have to approve the outcome, giving it the right to veto any accord.

The toughened version of the law also requires the republic to pay the expenses of people who leave because they oppose independence. About 9% of Lithuania’s 3.7 million people are ethnic Russians, most of whom are against secession. The cost of resettling them would thus be a substantial part of the independence tab.

Igor Gryazin, an Estonian deputy watching the debate in the Supreme Soviet as an observer, said his republic would ignore the law. Estonia’s legislature declared its own step-by-step path out of the Soviet Union last week, condemned Kremlin pressure on Lithuania and expressed support for its independence drive on Tuesday.

Georgian lawmaker Tengiz P. Buachidze also criticized the law as too tough and announced that the entire delegation of his southern republic would vote against it.

Nevertheless, the legislation passed by lopsided majorities in separate votes in both chambers of the 542-member Supreme Soviet, and it will enter into force when it is published. By a large margin, the Council of the Union also passed the bill on states of emergency that was approved Monday by the other chamber, the Council of Nationalities, meaning it becomes law as well.

That legislation empowers Gorbachev to declare states of emergency in the republics during which authorities can confiscate firearms, ban rallies and strikes, censor the media and suspend activities of political parties.

If local police and the KGB prove incapable of restoring order, Gorbachev can impose direct presidential rule, a provision local activists say can be used to neutralize the actions of an independence-minded republic.

Perhaps most worrisome for the growing number of independence advocates on the Soviet periphery, the secession law provides for dismembering their republics if ethnic minorities populating a given district opt out of independence.

Likewise, so-called autonomous republics or regions like the predominantly Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh that has been a part of Azerbaijan since the 1920s would have the right to decide by themselves for or against independence.

Since demographics in this land of more than 100 nationalities are often an ethnic crazy quilt, as in valleys where Georgians, Azerbaijanis and other groups have lived side by side in the Caucasus for centuries, independence could provoke the breakup of a republic into independent and pro-Moscow areas, a provision of the law certain to discourage secession.

Under the new law, republics could also be shorn of lands they did not have when they joined the Soviet Union, another good argument for not tampering with the status quo.

Byelorussia has already laid claims to tracts it said were given Lithuania after it became a Soviet republic in 1940, even including the present-day capital of Vilnius.

The Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians maintain that Soviet law does not apply to them since their homelands did not voluntarily join the Soviet Union but were forcibly annexed by Josef Stalin’s Kremlin under a secret agreement with Nazi Germany.

However, Gorbachev’s new press secretary, who gave his first briefing for journalists Tuesday inside the Kremlin, indicated that no exceptions would be made for the Baltic republics when asked about the current legal status of Lithuania.

“Lithuania is part of the U.S.S.R., and all questions pertaining to the state structure of the republic and the problem of being in or out of the Soviet federation can be solved exclusively on a constitutional basis, even if that basis is not to somebody’s liking,” Arkady A. Maslennikov said.