Moscow Party Loyalist Becomes Lithuanian Underdog : Communists: Power and support is growing for the charismatic politician and his followers.

Vladislav Shved bursts into his office and throws a pile of newspapers down onto his heavy wooden desk in disgust. They are the newspapers of the pro-independence movement of Lithuania, and each one of them refers to Shved as a “fanatic” and proposes to shut down his opposition group.

Shved, the leader of the small but vocal faction of the Communist Party here that is still loyal to Moscow, says the Lithuanian media have him all wrong.

“This is their glasnost (openness), their liberalism?” he asks in booming tones. “They say we fight against free speech, but this is disinformation of the worst kind. This is no civilized society they are building here. The editors all publish only what they are told.”

In the Soviet Union, it is nothing new for an opposition group to be denounced officially by the government. But what is ironic in the topsy-turvy world of Lithuanian politics today is that the government is non-Communist while its opposition is decidedly, loudly and fervently so.

All of which has put Shved--a commanding man with the charisma to rouse a crowd and the shrewdness to be considered dangerous by many of his opponents--into a position that suits him just fine, that of the underdog.

In the nearly two months since the coalition of pro-independence groups swept the Communists from power here and declared Lithuania independent of the Soviet Union, Shved and the group he leads have grown exponentially in influence.

They became known as the Night Party because they were formed in a late-night session after the majority of delegates at the party congress had voted to break with the Soviet Communist Party on the issue of national independence; officially, they are known as the Lithuanian Communist Party on the Soviet party platform. They have their own Central Committee and party secretaries and travel to Moscow for meetings with the Soviet party leadership.

From the first, Shved and his colleagues were vocal in their denunciation of pro-independence forces here. From the beginning also, they found support among conservative forces in Moscow.

Recently, however, their power and support have grown and they have organized a series of anti-independence actions. Working from a shabby building up a hill from the headquarters of the new government here, they have enlisted the help of Soviet army troops stationed in the republic. They have dropped pamphlets over Vilnius denouncing the pro-independence forces. And they have forcefully occupied Communist Party and government buildings in the Lithuanian capital.

It is unclear how many supporters the Night Party has in Lithuania, although it claims that more than 35,000 of the 200,000 members of the Lithuanian Communist Party joined its ranks at the split. Demonstrations organized by Shved and other opposition leaders have drawn crowds of up to 35,000. From pockets of workers and farmers that are getting bigger all the time, Shved’s rousing, rhetoric-filled speeches are met with boisterous cheers.

From what he says in those speeches, Shved is indeed easy to dismiss as a fanatic. He uses words like “dictator” and “oppressors” to describe the first democratically elected government in Lithuania in 50 years. He speaks ringingly of “Stalinist forces” taking over the republic and warns of a coming apocalypse of unemployment and chaos.

But in the privacy of their offices, each hung with twin portraits of V. I. Lenin and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Shved and his compatriots sound a good deal more reasonable:

They say they support a freer Lithuania as part of a reformed Soviet Union.

They say they believe in glasnost and perestroika , Gorbachev’s policies of openness, restructuring and reform.

They say they love their republic and fear that the path the new government has taken leads to ruin.

“Lithuania is too small to live alone in the world,” Shved said. “And this independence will ruin the Soviet Union, too. It is not good to ruin the union when we are now working to make all Soviet life better.”

Shved and his followers propose turning Lithuania back to the purer version of socialism that they acknowledge has never really existed in the Soviet Union. They say they consider private enterprise to be exploitation and propose that factories be owned by the workers, not by the state.

They say they want to reform prices, to put the money needed to live into balance with the money earned. They say it is impossible to transform a socialist society into a capitalist one. Better, they say, to support the Gorbachev government program of social and economic reform.

“We can ruin socialism, but we cannot create capitalism here,” said Stanislava Yonene, editor of the Sovietskaya Litva, the newspaper that the Night Party has recently adopted as its own.

When it comes to a program of their own, Night Party loyalists acknowledge that they are long on ideas and short of mechanisms to accomplish their goals. In fact, when pressed, Shved admitted that he couldn’t come up with a single mechanism.

“The man who works this mechanism out will get three Nobel Prizes,” he said with a laugh. “It is primitive to think that only one Shved can solve this problem.”

Shved says specifics are not the issue anyway. Instead, he said, the issue is removing pro-independence leaders from power. That is his goal and the goal of his party, he says, and until he accomplishes it, he will keep dropping pamphlets from helicopters and demonstrating in the streets.

“They show me like I am a monster, like some kind of a dark force that wants to ruin everything,” Shved said. “I want to save the system. I want to fight on television, in newspapers, at meetings. I am fighting for a real goal.”