Latvian Party Divides Over Independence

Radicals stormed out of the congress of the Latvian Communist Party on Saturday after the majority of delegates refused to seek the Baltic republic’s independence from the Soviet Union.

Nearly one-third of the 792 delegates, virtually all Latvian nationalists, broke away from the party congress when the majority voted down a draft platform that would have established an autonomous Latvian Communist Party as a step toward independence for the republic itself.

“We are out of this,” Juris Rosenwald, one of the leading radicals, said as the group moved to another hall. “We will go ahead and discuss the party program ourselves . . . but it will be that of a new party.”

The breakaway in Riga, although expected, means that the Soviet leadership under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev now faces political rebellions, each serious but each different, throughout the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in a constitutional and state crisis that has already impaired Gorbachev’s ability to lead the country.

In Lithuania, which declared its independence from the Soviet Union four weeks ago, more than 150,000 supporters of Sajudis, the nationalist grass-roots movement that now leads the republic, gathered Saturday in Vilnius, the capital, to demonstrate the popular backing that the new government enjoys.

“Iron will melt to wax, and water will turn to stone before we will retreat,” Vytautas Landsbergis, the Lithuanian president and Sajudis leader, told the crowd, quoting the battle cry of Lithuania’s 14th-Century national hero Duke Gediminas.

“Are we going to survive persecution and provocation?” Landsbergis shouted to cries of “Yes, yes!” “Do we really know what we want? We are not going to abandon our goal, are we?”

An army helicopter flew overhead at tree-top level showering leaflets on the crowd quoting Gorbachev’s appeal last weekend to Lithuanians to annul their declaration of independence and discuss their grievances with the central government.

Landsbergis, speaking to the rally, said, “For 70 years, they have been littering the whole world and Lithuania, but their end is clear--their pamphlets and they themselves will end up on the trash heap of history.”

In a new appeal to Gorbachev, the gathering called for talks between Lithuania and the central government. The declaration of independence was adopted by a democratically elected Parliament, the appeal said, and it is supported by a majority of the republic’s 3.7 million people.

Meeting in Vilnius’ Vingio park, the rally was the biggest show of support in recent months for Sajudis and the course it has taken since it took over the government. The crowds were so dense that the official Soviet news agency Tass and central television put the total at 300,000, although observers present in the crowd put the total at perhaps only half or two-thirds of that.

With Latvian and Byelorussian nationalist flags as well as Lithuania’s flying, the mood was of determination tinged with defiance as the speakers denounced the central government for its attempts to make Lithuania retreat on its plans to secede from the Soviet Union.

“You do not have to be a professional historian to know that in 1939 Hitler and Stalin sold out the Baltic states to build their empires,” Yuri N. Afanasyev, a visiting radical member of the Soviet Parliament and a historian by profession, told the rally. “March 11, the day you declared your independence, signaled the beginning of the end for the world’s last empire.”

In Riga, the Latvian capital, the walkout by the 242 delegates was televised live, and it brought several thousand of the radicals’ supporters to the building where the congress was being held.

“We may be a minority here, but within Parliament we do form a majority, and among the people, our majority is not in question,” one of the radicals had warned the congress before the vote. “There we have the votes, and we will not be discussing autonomy for the party but independence for the nation.”

But delegates, influenced by the central government’s stern attitude toward neighboring Lithuania’s unilateral declaration of independence four weeks ago, voted to put the whole question off until mid-summer.

Boris K. Pugo, a former Latvian party leader and now an alternate member of the Soviet party’s ruling Politburo in Moscow, urged Latvian Communists not to imitate Lithuania, whose party formally split with the Soviet party last December.

“You know that the Communist Party of Lithuania was weakened, both in the election and in losses of memberships, by its decision to become independent,” Pugo said. “Is there any point in repeating that sad experience here?”

Such a break would badly damage the Latvian party, Pugo said, because Latvians form a bare majority of the population of their republic and constitute a minority among the party’s 177,000 members. Most Russians and other non-Latvians want to remain part of the Soviet Union and retain the present relations with the Soviet Communist Party.

Warning that secession would prove long and painful, Pugo urged Latvian Communists to model their approach on Gorbachev’s “new political thinking.”

“Never reject dialogue, never refuse to seek points of mutual advantage, never oppose compromise,” he counseled.

“There is a need for prudence and genuine party and state wisdom. It is not difficult to ‘slam the door’ or suppress a minority in a vote. It is more difficult to show tolerance and respect for the opinion of others.”

Alfred Cepanis, a deputy prime minister and a leading advocate of an independent Communist Party for Latvia, told the delegates that a split was avoidable if they committed the party to “create a just and democratic society in a free and independent Latvia,” as outlined in a new party program.

The delegates applauded his speech, but when the vote came, the program was voted down. And with that the radicals walked out of the congress.

The split in the Latvian party had been expected, however, and after walking out, the minority group immediately scheduled an April 14 meeting to found a new party.

Esther Schrader, a free-lance journalist, contributed to this story from Vilnius.