Soviets Step Up Economic War on Lithuania

The Soviet Union escalated its economic warfare against Lithuania on Thursday, sharply curtailing crucial natural gas supplies, and a Soviet spokesman warned that further sanctions might be imposed in an effort to pressure the republic into renouncing its independence declaration.

The Lithuanian government said the republic has only two weeks’ worth of energy supplies. It said it is imposing strict gasoline rationing today and will announce other rationing measures in the coming days.

“We do everything for only two goals, freedom and Lithuania,” President Vytautas Landsbergis said in explaining the need for rationing.

Algirdas Brazauskas, deputy prime minister, called the Moscow-imposed restrictions “very severe--inhumane even.” But, speaking on Lithuanian television, he urged his fellow countrymen to stay calm.

Lithuanian leaders said they have information that further supplies to the republic would soon be embargoed but declined to be specific. Matuzas Saulus, an economic planning spokesman for Lithuania, said Moscow already is delaying the republic’s access to its hard currency reserves.

“Transactions that used to take two or three days are taking up to two or three months,” he said.

The Kremlin had cut off petroleum supplies to the republic’s only refinery on Wednesday night. On Thursday, long lines formed at Vilnius gas stations for the fourth straight day. Several stations were forced to close early because they ran out of gasoline. But many Lithuanians in the capital city seemed to adopt a philosophical view toward the Kremlin-ordered fuel cutoffs.

“We are used to different shortages during socialist times,” explained Virgilijius Savickas, an editor at the daily newspaper Lithuania’s Morning, referring to persistent shortages of consumer goods in the Soviet Union. “We know that if we stay in the old order these shortages will continue. Our only chance is to break away.”

Rasa Alishauskiene, head of the Sociological Research Laboratory at Vilnius University, said the Moscow measures have served to help unify most of the population behind the government.

“For 50 years, we were educated by the Soviets to be a collective. And now, ironically, the ideology is deeply ingrained. But the idea they are unifying around is the idea of independence,” she said, basing her analysis on a still-unpublished poll of Lithuanian residents.

Only hours after stopping the oil supplies, Moscow reduced natural gas supplies into the republic by 84%, closing off three out of four natural gas pipelines reaching Lithuania at midday Thursday.

A telegram received in Vilnius from the Soviet Council of Ministers, the Cabinet, said that about 3.5 million cubic meters of natural gas per day would still be sent to Lithuania. But Lithuanian leaders noted that the republic uses an average of 18 million cubic meters of natural gas daily and, in addition, supplies the nearby Kaliningrad region of the Russian republic. The Soviet Council of Ministers ordered the republic to continue supplying Kaliningrad.

The economic sanctions were imposed after President Mikhail S. Gorbachev issued an ultimatum a week ago, warning that he would halt key supplies to the republic unless its Parliament rescinds laws bolstering a March 11 declaration of independence.

Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Vadim P. Perfiliev, speaking in Moscow, said the Kremlin “might have some other restrictions” to impose on Lithuania but declined to elaborate.

According to the Associated Press, Gorbachev also met Thursday with leaders of the two other Baltic republics, Latvia and Estonia, both of which had announced their intention to reassert the independence that was snatched from all three republics by Soviet annexation in 1940.

In separate meetings in the Kremlin, the Soviet president offered both republics “special status” in a “confederative” Soviet Union, if they stop trying to follow Lithuania’s lead, AP quoted Baltic officials and journalists as saying.

But Endel Lippma, Estonia’s minister for intergovernmental negotiations, said Gorbachev also threatened Estonia with a blockade like the one imposed on Lithuania. Similarly, Gorbachev told President Anatoly V. Gorbunov of Latvia and his delegation that he would not talk further if they declare independence on May 3 as planned, said Aris Yansons, Gorbunov’s assistant.

The cut in Lithuania’s energy supplies is likely to force some factories to close and, in a kind of domino effect, take a significant bite out of Lithuania’s annual budget of about 4 billion rubles ($6.66 billion at the official rate), said Deputy Finance Minister Apolinaras Cepaitis.

Profits from the republic’s industries account for 12% of the budget and thus “we will face budget deficits in all areas,” he said in an interview. But he vowed that Lithuania would keep a strict accounting of the cost of the economic sanctions and “when we finally sit down at the negotiating table, we will put that to the Soviet Union as a damage claim.”

Kazamieras Antanavicius, a Lithuanian lawmaker and economist, predicted that his fellow Lithuanians would become more desperate, once they feel their livelihood is threatened.

“The people will be jobless. They haven’t got any savings at all and they must eat something. What will happen to us?” he said in an interview. “Think about it. If you have three kids and nothing to eat, will you panic or not?”

He said Lithuania’s efforts to buy replacement energy supplies from Western countries is very complicated, not only because of a shortage of foreign currency but because “we haven’t got pipelines, we haven’t got transport, we haven’t got tankers.”

A delegation led by the republic’s prime minister, Kazimiera Prunskiene, was in Oslo seeking support from Norwegian leaders. Norway’s center-right government said it will not help subsidize oil sales and that it is up to oil companies to decide whether to sell to Lithuania. Norway’s state oil firm Statoil says it is willing to do so but only at a market price, which the Lithuanians are unlikely to be able to afford..

Deputy Prime Minister Brazauskas is to head an emergency committee set up to implement rationing plans. The Lithuanian government warned that it would totally cut supplies to any ministry, factory or business that violated rationing orders.

For starters, gasoline is to be rationed beginning this afternoon to 7.8 gallons per private car per month, officials announced. Energy Minister Leonas Asmantas said strict rationing is necessary because the republic only has enough energy supplies to last two weeks. Schools and hospitals, he said, would be the last of public buildings to face rationing.

Many Lithuanians, like 65-year-old Nina Vorobiova, were bracing themselves for further economic retaliation from Moscow.

“Every day we face the same pressure, and at the end we say thank God we have made it,” said Vorobiova, sitting at lunchtime on a bench in the city’s central Lenin Square. “But then we have to wait for tomorrow to come.”

Anatoly Golovkin is an ethnic Russian who supports Lithuania’s current government, even though he knows that he is a minority here and that Moscow’s response to that government may put him out of a job. “We are morally prepared” for economic hardship caused by the Moscow-imposed sanctions, he said.

Golovkin is the deputy director of the Vilnius Electricity Measuring Equipment Factory, which has a monopoly in the Soviet Union on the production of meters used to measure electricity usage. He argued that Moscow’s measures against Lithuania will hurt the Soviet Union itself.

“If they don’t supply raw materials to this factory, they won’t have any meters,” he said. “It’s just like cutting off the branch of the tree on which you are sitting.”

Not all of the 4,000 workers at his factory, however, agreed. Three-quarters of the employees are non-Lithuanians, as is 20% of the republic’s population of 3.8 million, and many complain they are being made to suffer for an independence declaration they do not support.

“It was right for the Soviet Union to cut off fuel supplies,” said Valentian Novoselskaya, drawing cheers from other assembly line workers gathered around her when she added that she thought Gorbachev should impose presidential rule in the republic.