Lithuania Makes New Bid to End Crisis : Secession: The president offers to suspend some measures. Latvia’s Parliament is expected to vote on independence.

Lithuania, bitten hard by Soviet sanctions that forced rationing of some foodstuffs beginning this week, made a new bid Wednesday to end the crisis through negotiations, calling on Western countries to serve as its intermediaries with the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, Lithuania’s neighboring republic, Latvia, prepared for a parliamentary session that is expected to lead to a vote also proclaiming a restoration of the independence snuffed out when Josef Stalin forcibly took over the Baltic lands half a century ago.

Lawmakers in the third Baltic republic, Estonia, have already voted for the eventual restoration of sovereignty. So Latvia’s declaration, expected Friday, will confront Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev with an entire region of about 9 million people legislatively on record as wanting to leave the Soviet Union--and the worry that pro-independence sentiment will snowball elsewhere in this increasingly restive country.

The prime minister of breakaway Lithuania’s government, Kazimiera Prunskiene, will call at the White House today for talks with President Bush. Bush last week decided not to impose sanctions for now to punish the Soviets for the way they have treated Lithuania since the republic’s legislature voted March 11 to secede.

The Lithuanians have been dismayed and angered by the reluctance of Bush and other Western leaders to bolster them against Soviet pressure and intimidation to withdraw that declaration. But on Wednesday, President Vytautas Landsbergis, in a letter to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Francois Mitterrand, called on Western democracies to inform the Kremlin that Lithuania is ready to consider a “temporary suspension of the effects of decisions taken by the Parliament . . . which could bother Soviet authorities.”

“Everything is negotiable save a questioning of the restored independence of the Lithuanian state on March 11, 1990,” said the letter, made public by the republic’s information service.

Landsbergis was responding to a proposal from Kohl and Mitterrand that Lithuania suspend laws it passed to implement its independence declaration, in return for which the Kremlin presumably would agree to ease an economic embargo it imposed last month.

Soviet authorities had reacted favorably to the Kohl-Mitterrand proposal, but it was unclear whether Landsbergis’ offer to place a moratorium on the new laws’ operation would satisfy Gorbachev. The Soviet president has denounced the independence move as illegal and wants the independence proclamation itself frozen or suspended. The phrasing of Landsbergis’ letter apparently did not include that possibility.

On Tuesday, food rationing went into effect in the republic of 3.8 million people, limiting the amount of sugar, noodles, margarine and some other foodstuffs that consumers can buy. Oil and gas deliveries from the Soviet Union, upon which Lithuania is totally dependent, also have been cut by the central government.

Prunskiene, who was visiting Canada with a delegation to try to drum up trade before flying to the United States, said Tuesday in Toronto that she will ask Bush to try to persuade Gorbachev to end the economic blockade of her homeland. The superpower leaders are to hold a summit meeting in Washington beginning May 30.

Meanwhile, in the Baltic port of Riga, the stage was being set for a bitter parliamentary battle over the re-establishment of Latvian independence. Many there are fearful that the action will draw the Kremlin’s ire, as the Lithuanian secession vote did.

“The example of Lithuania is plainly visible,” Viktors Alksnis, a Latvian lawmaker in the Supreme Soviet, the Moscow-based national legislature, told an anti-independence rally in the Latvian capital this week. “They made a decision in haste, and suddenly now it becomes clear that the cost of independence is $1 billion a year for oil.”

However, Sarmite Elerte, a spokeswoman for the pro-secession Latvian People’s Front, said the independence proclamation that has been drafted, unlike Lithuania’s, mandates a “transitional period” before complete local control is established or even claimed.

“We all realize there is a difference between announcing independence and realizing it.”

That, and the fact Latvian leaders have already held talks with Gorbachev and Soviet officials about their goals and intent, are reasons they believe there will be no explosion of Moscow’s fury.

The Latvian legislature is also supposed to vote on sending aid to Lithuania, but even People’s Front leaders, whose candidates dominate the body, are uncertain that they can have their way on that. Deputies from the grass-roots group are a few seats shy of the two-thirds majority needed to pass such major legislation as the independence declaration.

Although Latvian People’s Front officials say they have lined up support from seven or eight other deputies--enough, they say, to pass the laws--they cannot guarantee it.

“Sometimes someone will say they will vote for something, but whether he does it or not is another question,” Elerte said.

Latvia’s Parliament opens today, but it is not likely to tackle the independence issue before Friday. The initial hours of the session are expected to be taken up with choosing a credentials commission and secretariat, and election of the republic’s president.

Gorbachev wants independence-minded republics to secede by following steps mandated by a recently passed law that requires approval of two-thirds of the voters in the republic. The Latvians, however, like their Baltic neighbors, say they are not governed by those procedures, since their homelands were annexed by Moscow and never voluntarily joined the Soviet Union.

In Latvia, however, demographics are a further reason for the Latvians to insist on other procedures. Latvia is the most heavily Russified of the Baltic republics, and ethnic Latvians barely form a majority of the 2.7 million inhabitants, with Russians counting for at least a third. So it is highly questionable whether pro-independence forces could muster a two-thirds majority at the polls.

However, an unlikely source recently reported that independence seems to be backed by many non-Latvians. A survey in Latvia of about 25,000 residents found that 92% of the Latvians and 45% of the non-Latvians support the break, the Soviet newspaper Izvestia revealed last week.

“It’s likely (that) many of the Russians and other ethnic groups who live here have come to believe that no change is likely and no improvement in their living standard possible as long as Latvia remains part of the Soviet Union,” Elerte said.