Lithuania Closes Plants to Save Fuel : Secession: Official says there are indications of a freeze on rail and truck shipments. Intermediaries are reportedly presenting proposals to end the blockade.

The Lithuanian government, struggling to survive a Kremlin-imposed economic blockade, closed factories Saturday to save energy, and the deputy prime minister said he has information indicating that Moscow has ordered a freeze on all rail and truck shipments into the republic.

Meanwhile, intermediaries were reported to be presenting proposals to Moscow designed to end a five-week battle touched off by Lithuania’s defiant and unprecedented March 11 declaration of independence from the Soviet Union.

Traffic was light in this capital city as residents curtailed pleasure driving on a sunny spring day in response to gasoline rationing of 7.8 gallons a month for private cars. Some drivers said they crossed into other republics to fill their tanks, and a long line formed in front of a shop selling bicycles in central Vilnius.

The Lithuanian government drafted a telegram to Moscow warning that in a matter of days the republic’s factories will be forced to stop fulfilling contracts with the Soviet government due to energy rationing and a lack of raw materials, Deputy Prime Minister Romualdas Ozolas said in an interview.

The republic of 3.8 million people holds a near-monopoly on the production of many electronic goods for the whole Soviet Union, including high-technology components, television switches and electric meters. A cutoff of these goods could exacerbate consumer shortages in the country.

The telegram was prepared after an emergency meeting between the Lithuanian leadership and directors of more than 100 factories in the republic, who warned that their situation is becoming dire, Ozolas said. “The directors say morale is high, but they were speaking very somberly. They say some factories will have to close in three or four days,” he said.

The Kremlin announced a cutoff of all oil supplies and 84% of natural gas supplies to the republic after its leaders refused to meet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s deadline to rescind independence legislation.

Lithuanian officials said other goods also are being withheld, including steel, wood and some food items. Food, however, poses no immediate problem because the republic supplies most of its own meat and dairy needs.

Ozolas said Moscow has withheld payments for goods produced by and delivered from Lithuanian factories. He said a delegation headed by the republic’s finance minister will travel Monday to Moscow to discuss the problem with officials from the Soviet State Bank.

In a further tightening of the economic noose, the Lithuanian government has “information that the Soviet Ministry of Transport has informed all the Soviet organizations and plants that nothing can be exported to Lithuania,” Ozolas said. He declined to elaborate and said he has no official document to prove Moscow is expanding its blockade.

There also was no immediate confirmation from Moscow. But Soviet gas industry minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, asked during a visit to Helsinki whether supplies would be further reduced to the rebellious republic, replied, “Time will tell.”

Despite the blockade, small amounts of oil reached Lithuania on Saturday, Ozolas said. “It’s like a light shining from a star. It takes a long time to reach here,” the deputy prime minister explained. “There’s inertia in the system and as long as it takes for industries to receive this order, the longer we will be receiving things.”

But because of the sanctions, Ozolas said, the government ordered most factories to close on Saturday, normally a working day. “We decided not to waste our strength while it is not necessary,” he said.

President Vytautus Landsbergis told reporters that some suggestions for a possible compromise with Moscow had been raised in contacts through middlemen. He declined to be more specific but, in a sign of a bending of wills here, Deputy Prime Minister Algirdas Brazauskas told Parliament on Friday that the time had come for Lithuania to seek a compromise.

Gorbachev so far has refused publicly repeated appeals from the republic to open negotiations. Spokesmen for the pro-independence Sajudis movement said privately, however, that some Sajudis officials traveled to Moscow four days ago in an effort to hold informal meetings with advisers to Gorbachev. No details from the meetings were immediately available.

Lithuanian Prime Minister Kazimiera Prunskiene traveled to Copenhagen on Saturday in an effort to obtain political support as well as alternative energy supplies. She was in Norway on Friday discussing how to obtain oil but so far has not been able to reach an agreement.

Without help from the West, Ozolas said, Lithuanians consider their drive for independence to be lost. “If there is no support from the West, there will be nothing,” he said. “If we do not get alternative supplies, we can say that our struggle is without hope.”

(At a meeting in Dublin, Ireland, foreign ministers of the European Community on Saturday criticized the Kremlin’s economic blockade of Lithuania and issued a veiled warning that it could affect Moscow’s relations with the West, Reuters news agency reported.

(In a statement, the 12 foreign ministers called on all sides to exercise maximum restraint and hinted that the Lithuanian government should not push its independence campaign too hard.

(“The community and its member states express their serious concern at the economic measures recently introduced by Moscow in relation to Lithuania,” the statement said. “(The EC believes) that measures of a coercive nature can make no contribution to the search for a solution through dialogue.”

(Ministers agreed that officials would meet this week to review the situation and its “policy implications”--a phrase which diplomats said is intended as a signal to Moscow that the EC would react if it went too far, Reuters reported.

(One diplomat said: “Clearly it’s in no one’s interest to undermine Gorbachev. But clearly there is a limit to what we can accept.”)

Lithuanian leaders met Saturday with Estonian Prime Minister Edgar Savisaar to discuss securing aid from that nearby Baltic republic.

“What happened in Vilnius yesterday could happen in Tallinn (the Estonian capital) tomorrow,” said Savisaar, referring to the violent occupation by Soviet soldiers of a Communist Party-owned printing plant, during which a dozen Lithuanian civilians were injured. “Estonians understand this and are ready to share the hardships.”

Lithuania, Estonia and the third Baltic republic, Latvia, were forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 under a secret pact between Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler.