Documentary : Standing Up to the Wrath of Gorbachev : A Lithuanian family faces the Kremlin’s threats with calm, even with humor. They fear the future, but even more they fear the thought of a homeland that is not free.

In the Kaspariunene household, a crowded but impeccably neat apartment nine floors up in a concrete-block building on the outskirts of Vilnius, 17-year-old Ruste is singing a song of the Lithuanian countryside. For a moment, thoughts of an economic blockade of her homeland fade as her clear soprano fills the room.

“For me, songs are the top of my life,” said Ruste, the shy middle child of a close-knit family. “It is just in my bones. When all the family is together singing, it is the best for our strength. If they turn the lights out, I can still sing. Instead of crying, I just sing.”

The day a reporter met Ruste and her family, it was sunny and bright, and neither the drab closeness of their apartment nor the possibility of a shutdown of electricity or heat dampened the family spirit.

The Kaspariunenes are just one family in this republic of 3.8 million people, but they appear typical of many in tiny, feisty Lithuania. They are calm and sober and they work desperately hard. They are proud and reserved and fiercely loyal to their homeland. And while they are concerned about the Soviet government’s tightening of the economic screws on Lithuania, they are determined to survive and to help take their nation peacefully out of the crumbling Soviet Union.

If this family of five is any example, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will find that it will take tremendous economic force to crack the Lithuanians’ resolve.

The Kaspariunenes are marked by the sufferings of their people--grandparents deported to Siberia in Stalin’s time; shortages of nearly everything at one time or another; the kind of life--as is true throughout the Soviet Union--where buying meat can take eight hours, where some days it seems as if nothing works right and where it is the simple struggle of daily life that wears one down.

The family believes that Lithuania’s only way out is to follow the program of the nationalist movement now leading the republic’s government. They fear the consequences, but even stronger is their resolve that their children will not have to live the same difficult lives as they did. They are willing to gamble, they say, for the future of Lithuanians to come.

“We’ve been in the Soviet Union for 50 years, and all this time our nation was getting worse and worse,” said Rasmutis Kaspariunene, 49, an engineer in an electronic research institute. “After this life we’ve had the last two years (since the republic’s independence movement was founded), it would be too traumautic to stay in the Soviet Union. People couldn’t stand it. They have gotten too much fresh air.

“Even if the soldiers will put us down, our children will have had this breath of fresh air,” Rasmutis said. “They will rise up again in the future.”

A poll released Friday by the Gallup organization found that kind of determination widespread in Lithuania. The poll, conducted in Vilnius earlier this month, found that four out of five citizens see their future in an independent democratic state outside the Soviet Union. Among people of Lithuanian descent, that figure was even higher--89%.

Now the Soviet authorities have cut oil and gas supplies to the breakaway Baltic republic, but during breakfast last weekend it was clear that for Kaspariunenes, as for most Lithuanians, the fear of losing material goods is secondary to the tension of not knowing what may happen next.

They were exhausted from nearly a month of watching television anxiously for news of the latest building seizure by Soviet troops or of other military activity. They were worried that the confrontation between Soviet soldiers and civilians here last week could herald the beginning of a wider outbreak of violence. But with shops still stocked as normal and factories still running, the economic sanctions themselves did not yet seem real.

The Kremlin crackdown was the topic of musing and conversation rather than panic. The family’s apartment was brightly lit, after all. The family car parked nearby was filled with gas. Outside was the hazy warmth of spring, and inside the family was eating a hot breakfast, cooked--with little regard for fuel shortages--on three burners of the gas stove.

“It’s hard to imagine it now when we still have things,” Ruste’s sister Giedre said of the economic sanctions. “We don’t notice it now. Besides, what should we do? Shall we begin beating the soldiers or quarrelling with them? It won’t last forever. For a short time we can overcome anything. Talking about it won’t help.”

Giedre, long blonde hair in a braid down her back, is a third-year student in biology at Vilnius University and a studious, practical woman of 20. She says that the blockade is a frequent topic when she and her boyfriend meet their friends in the ancient courtyards and dark cafes of their school’s 16th-Century campus.

But while she has rarely missed a chance in the past two years to attend demonstrations organized by the pro-independence movement known as Sajudis, Giedre says there is more reality for her in the life forms she studies in her books than in the talk of politics and doom and sudden change.

“I cannot imagine that we will be without oil and gas,” said Giedre’s mother, Nijole. “It’s very inhumane of Gorbachev. It’s a kind of killing people. I just can’t believe that he will let this happen. I would not like to think that here works not a political man, but a sadist.”

The Lithuanian leaders in whom the Kaspariunenes have put their trust warn that the republic has only enough oil and gas reserves for a month and that the Kremlin will also be cutting food shipments. But the Kaspariunenes say they are not really afraid. There is Ruste’s singing concert to attend today and young Jonas’ school uniform to wash.

And this afternoon, the family has an outing planned to their small garden plot about 20 miles outside town, which they rent for 3 rubles a year ($4.80 at the official exchange rate). That is the most urgent concern today, the Kaspariunenes say, because if they don’t plant tomatoes now, next weekend could be too late.

Nevertheless, the family was not ignoring the Soviet threat completely. Nijole was heading out to the shops to buy candles. Rasmutis had spent three hours in line for gasoline the day before, filling the tank of his 25-year-old car. Jonas, an 11-year-old electronics whiz, was worried that a fuel shortage would bring an end to his afternoons spent programming his father’s computer. And the family knew that if gas rationing continued for long, it would bring an end to their trips out to their garden and their Saturdays would be spent in Vilnius with the crowds.

All that doesn’t seem so bad to the Kaspariunenes. Like most Soviet families, they are accustomed to small difficulties, and they have learned to take it all in stride.

When Nijole and Rasmutis Kaspariunene were first married, they couldn’t find an apartment for three years. They lived with two other families in one room of a hostel, sharing a bathroom and a kitchen and lacking the privacy newlyweds need.

When they moved into their apartment 18 years ago, the elevator wasn’t working, so they carried their furniture up the nine flights of stairs. They joke when their refrigerator breaks down, when their clunker of a car doesn’t start and when they don’t have running water for hours or days.

They laugh uproariously recalling a sentence in a Soviet-made English-language grammar book that everyone in this country seems to have heard. “I am an optimist,” the sentence goes. “My favorite color is red.”

The Kaspariunenes have two bedrooms in their apartment. The parents sleep in one of them, on two narrow beds pushed together because they have been unable to find a double bed in the shops. The two girls share the other bedroom, and Jonas sleeps on a couch in the front hall. Like most homes here, the furniture and decorations are mismatched, flung together from whatever the family could find.

In a tiny walk-in closet in the hall, Rasmutis has fashioned a workshop for himself. It is hung with drillbits and wrenches and screwdrivers that he has collected with great effort over the years. He uses them to repair everything from electric wiring and the apartment’s unreliable plumbing to the hinges on the bedroom doors.

A corner of the family living room is where Nijole sews, making nearly all her family’s clothes by hand because, she says, there is little to be found in the stores.

For all the daily tedium and for all the lack of luxury that the apartment reflects, everywhere there are personal touches--black and white photographs of friends and relatives on the walls, plants and flowers in every corner, a Lithuanian lute on a side table and a basket of Easter fronds fashioned from dried flowers next to the piano.

When reminded that Lithuanians’ standard of living is somewhat better than that in most parts of the Soviet Union, the Kaspariunenes stop joking.

“We know that we live better than in other parts,” said Rasmutis. “But we don’t want to take our orders from Russia. I am tired of my children going to school and learning lies. If we will live worse, so be it. But we will live on our own.”

As Ruste sang the songs of her grandfather and her father’s sure bass joined her in harmony, the family seemed to rest for a moment from the waiting and the anxiety and the fatigue. It was the weekend after all, and things weren’t so bad. Maybe, they seemed to be thinking, the logjam would break before life really changes for the worse.

“I believe that Lithuania will win. I can’t live otherwise,” said Nijole. “Our nation is strong. We want only truth, and we can achieve it. I don’t think it will be very soon, but it will be.”