Blockade Is On, Lithuania Says : Secession: Gorbachev is accused of ‘brutal’ action on natural gas and oil. But Moscow denies any cutbacks.

Lithuanian leaders said the Kremlin made good Tuesday on its threat to throttle their economy by ordering drastic cutbacks in natural gas deliveries and a halt in oil supplies for the breakaway Baltic republic’s sole refinery.

Lithuania’s leader, Vytautas Landsbergis, accused Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of “brutal” action to break his homeland’s drive for independence from Moscow, but he said the energy cuts would not have that effect.

Soviet officials, however, denied that anything had been done at all.

“There have been no cuts in the gas supply to Lithuania,” said Vladimir Khatalin, head of the Moscow-based government agency that oversees natural gas distribution nationwide. “Everything is proceeding as scheduled.”

There was also no immediate announcement in state-run Soviet media.

Gorbachev had given Landsbergis’ government a 48-hour deadline Friday to rescind legislation that he said “set(s) Lithuania in opposition to other republics and the Soviet Union as a whole,” or face the cutoff of key raw materials such as oil and gas that are now supplied almost exclusively by the rest of the Soviet Union.

The deadline expired Sunday with no visible action to back up Gorbachev’s demand that Lithuania revoke the legislation, which halted the usual springtime conscription drive by the Soviet army and established identity cards for Lithuanian residents--as well as the alleged takeover of property belonging to the Communist Party.

On Tuesday, the Speaker of the Lithuanian Supreme Council, Aleksandras Abisalas, announced that the economic reprisals from Moscow, long feared by many Lithuanians since the council voted March 11 to secede from the Soviet Union, had begun.

Abisalas told Parliament that a telegram received from Soviet officials said: “In executing the order No. 81D on April 16, 1990, by the government of the U.S.S.R. and the National Gas Concern, the supply of natural gas to the Lithuanian S.S.R. will be strongly decreased as of April 17.”

The message was from the general director of the state-owned gas distribution enterprise Zapadtransgas, a man identified only as Mocerniuk, Abisalas said, and was addressed to the general director of the Lithuanian Natural Gas Industrial Assn.

Prime Minister Kazimiera Prunskiene later told a news conference in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius that she had been informed that crude oil deliveries would also be halted to the Mazeikiai Oil Refinery between 6 and 7 a.m. today.

“This is just the beginning,” Prunskiene, an economist, told reporters. “It seems things are moving towards a very concrete blockade.”

Prunskiene said that, judging by the tone of the telegram, she expected natural gas supplies to be cut by at least half. If supplies are cut by that much, Energy Minister Leonas Asmantas told the news conference, “severe shortages” of energy will result.

In remarks to a British radio station, Landsbergis said Lithuania will persevere despite the cuts.

“We can survive in poor conditions,” he said. “We survived in war conditions, in terrible postwar conditions, without any gas, without any oil. . . . We will survive.”

An emergency committee formed by the Lithuanian government will begin implementing a rationing plan for oil and natural gas today if the cuts begin as scheduled, Prunskiene said. That prospect immediately aroused concern among Lithuanians, especially factory workers who fear they will become unemployed when plants close for lack of an energy source, she said.

“Of course, the people are afraid, but the only way to calm them is to take practical steps,” the Lithuanian prime minister said.

Natural gas supplies were still normal Tuesday night, said Vita Laumenskaite of the grass-roots pro-independence movement Sajudis, of which Landsbergis is chairman. However, worried Lithuanians were flooding government offices with phone calls.

Having long expected retaliatory moves by Moscow to force a repudiation of the independence declaration, the Lithuanian government has secured “concrete promises” of assistance from foreign countries, as well as other Soviet republics chafing under Moscow’s rule, Prunskiene said. She declined to elaborate, but she said Foreign Minister Algirdas Saudargas would be traveling to oil- and gas-rich Norway today.

Lithuanian officials painted a dire picture of their resource-poor homeland’s fate if the energy cuts are implemented. Deputy Prime Minister Romualdas Ozolas said the republic has only enough crude oil reserves to generate five days’ worth of electricity.

Lithuania would have enough natural gas to supply its citizens with heat and cooking gas, but not enough to maintain current levels of output at factories, Asmantas said.

The Mazeikiai refinery, the only one in Lithuania, has only enough reserves to continue production for a day and a half, officials in the republic said.

Because the Soviet economy is interlinked, however, any move taken to punish the independence-minded Baltic republic is likely to harm other regions as well.

“In punishing us, they punish themselves. It seems the Soviet Union is not very interested in its own citizens,” Asmantas commented.

For example, more than half of the electricity generated in Lithuania is transmitted to other Soviet regions, Prunskiene said. All Lithuanian power plants are part of a unified Soviet power grid, and--as the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident showed--a drop in the electricity output of one plant can affect the power supply of areas far away.

Likewise, three natural gas pipelines running through Lithuania supply other parts of the country, so that any attempt to halt the gas flow would also be felt by non-Lithuanians. Algirdas Brazauskas, head of the pro-independence Communist Party, said the Russian federation’s enclave at Kaliningrad on the Baltic seaboard gets a full third of its natural gas via Lithuania.

As for the Mazeikiai refinery, which produces gasoline, diesel fuel, fuel oil and other products, it plays such an important role in the national Soviet economy that it accounts for 40% of all of Lithuania’s exports to the rest of the Soviet Union. Shutting it down could affect the supplies of gasoline and other petroleum products from Byelorussia to Leningrad, as well as in Lithuania itself, where jittery drivers began topping off their tanks over Easter weekend.

Lithuanian officials said the Soviet order exempts state-owned enterprises directly controlled by Moscow-based ministries from the natural gas cuts. Consequently it was not immediately clear whether supplies would continue to the largest power plant now functioning in the republic, the Lenin regional station in Elektrenai, which burns fuel oil and natural gas.

Some officials even played down the impact of the looming energy crunch on the lives of the republic’s 3.7 million people.

Prunskiene’s assistant, fellow Supreme Council Deputy Laima Andrikiene, said that of the 12 million tons of oil imported annually by Lithuania, the republic uses only 2.8 million tons to meet the direct needs of its citizens. The remainder is used by factories that produce goods chiefly shipped outside the republic, she said.

Similarly, of 7 billion cubic meters of gas used annually, 2.5 billion are used to meet the needs of the citizenry, with the rest going to industrial production, she said.

“So if they are not going to cut off 100% of the oil, we are absolutely sure we will have enough to live,” Andrikiene said. “We will have enough for ourselves, but we will have to decrease the amount we sell to other republics.”

Prunskiene said she will send telegrams to enterprises in Lithuania and other republics that would be affected by the cuts, urging them to pressure Moscow to rescind the sanctions. She also said her government is seeking to work out barter arrangements with factories in other Soviet republics that now use goods made in Lithuania.

The single largest source of electricity in Lithuania, the Ignalina atomic power station, is shut for repairs until May 20, leaving smaller power plants in the republic to generate current for Lithuania as well as Latvia, Byelorussia and Kaliningrad, Prunskiene said. She said the temporary closing of the Ignalina plant, over which the Soviet government has asserted direct control since Lithuania’s independence vote, did not appear linked to the economic sanctions.

Times staff writer Dahlburg reported from Moscow and Schrader, a free-lance journalist, from Vilnius.

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EVENTS LEADING TO SANCTIONS These events led to the Soviet threat to cut off supplies to Lithuania: March 11: Lithuania declares independence. Parliament elects Vytautas Landsbergis president, the first non-Communist leader in Soviet history. March 15: Soviet Parliament dismisses secession move as “illegal and invalid.” March 21: Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev orders Lithuanians to surrender weapons, toughens visa controls and border checks. March 22: The Kremlin sends a squad of prosecutors to Lithuania to enforce Soviet law in the restive republic. March 23: Soviets order diplomats out of Lithuania and bar journalists from entering. March 27: Soviet paratroopers raid psychiatric hospital to capture Lithuanian deserters from Red Army. March 29: Lithuanian leaders attempt to appease Soviets by urging citizens to turn over weapons and suspending plan to establish own border controls. Kremlin, meanwhiles, offers amnesty to Lithuanian deserters. April 1: Soviet tanks roll through Vilnius in show of military force. April 3: Soviet legislature adopts tough new secession rules and grants Gorbachev sweeping powers to declare states of emergency. April 13: Gorbachev gives Lithuania two days to rescind independence declaration or face cutoff of energy supplies. April 16: Lithuania defies Soviet ultimatum. Legislature meets in special session to draft survival plan. April 17: Lithuanian leaders report beginning of Soviet oil and natural gas cutbacks.