Pro-Soviets Lead Attacks in Baltics : Secession: Anti-independence demonstrators besiege Estonia’s Parliament. Police beat back unarmed soldiers in Latvia.

Thousands of pro-Soviet demonstrators besieged Estonia’s Parliament on Tuesday to demand that it break off the drive for independence, while in neighboring Latvia, unarmed Soviet soldiers tried to storm the legislature but were beaten back by police, witnesses and official reports said.

The anti-secession backlash in the Baltics, evidently coordinated, followed by one day President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s rejection of the two Soviet republics’ moves toward independence. It constituted dramatic proof of both the growing volatility of public opinion in the multi-ethnic region and the uncertain role to be played there by the armed forces.

In contrast to its neighbors, Lithuania was reported quiet Tuesday.

Between 5,000 and 6,000 anti-independence protesters stormed a courtyard outside the 14th-Century Toompea Palace in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, where the republic’s Parliament sits, reported Tonis Avikson, an editor at state-run Estonian Radio.

To show their hostility to the new government, protesters ripped down the blue-white-black flag that was made Estonia’s official banner last week and hoisted the red Soviet hammer and sickle instead.

Confronted with what he called a “political putsch ,” Prime Minister Edgar Savisaar twice appealed to Estonians on state-run radio to come to the scene and protect his government. Thousands responded, the radio said, forcing anti-independence demonstrators to leave the building where some had penetrated 10 minutes earlier.

A radio journalist inside said deputies were in a virtual state of siege. Witnesses said a retired officer among the demonstrators called for the Red Army’s guns to be turned on Estonian nationalists and for the use of “iron hand” tactics by Gorbachev.

Further unrest seemed assured in the republic where Russians and other non-Estonians make up about a third of the 1.6 million inhabitants. Before leaving through a human corridor of Estonians shouting “Get out of here!” anti-independence demonstrators vowed to stage a protest strike Thursday if the Parliament does not alter its course.

In Riga, the Latvian capital, about 2,000 unarmed Soviet soldiers tried earlier in the day to break past police lines and into that republic’s Parliament building, as lawmakers inside debated a bill allowing Latvian youths to opt for civil service at home in lieu of two years in the Soviet armed forces.

The soldiers, some in civilian clothes and all unarmed, chanted “U.S.S.R.!” and whistled in contempt.

Tanis Zelmenis, chief of the Latvian Foreign Ministry press department, said they ranged in rank from privates to lieutenant colonels.

“A big crowd of them, including cadets from the Yakov Alksnis and Biryuzov military schools, made an attempt to penetrate the building, but was stopped by members of the voluntary people’s patrol,” Zelmenis said, referring to an auxiliary to the regular Soviet police.

An elite police unit under the control of the Moscow-based Interior Ministry, commonly known as the “black berets”--for their trademark headgear--also helped drive off the soldiers by wielding their truncheons, Zelmenis said.

In the ensuing “stampede,” a journalist from official Latvian radio was injured, the Interfax News Agency reported. Other sources reported as many as 20 people hurt.

Since Lithuania, the third Baltic republic, unilaterally declared independence from Moscow in March, the Soviet armed forces have been used there to seize buildings, conduct sweeps for deserters and stage shows of force by cruising through urban areas in armored convoys.

The degree of high-level military involvement in the Riga protest was unclear, however. Dainis Ivans, Latvia’s deputy president, called the assault on Parliament an “organized event,” but some witnesses said it could have been spontaneous, since they doubted that the “black berets” would have intervened to halt it otherwise.

Tass, the official Soviet news agency, said merely that the “protesters included many people in military tunics,” apparently disavowing any official connection with the Soviet army.

“The militia contained demonstrators at great pains. There were scuffles in some places,” Tass said.

Ivans, the former chairman of the grass-roots People’s Front group that pushed for restoration of Latvian independence, told a news conference afterward that the new government in Riga would stand fast in favor of secession, despite Gorbachev’s declaration Monday that the acts it took to break with Moscow, as well as recent pro-independence decisions by Estonia’s lawmakers, are illegal and thus void.

“We’ve been going to Moscow for an entire year already with different proposals, but they weren’t listened to,” Ivans said. “We will give a corresponding answer (to Gorbachev), but we will not relinquish our declaration about the re-establishment of independence.”

Gorbachev’s now on-the-record opposition to even the more gradual paths toward independence chosen by Latvia and Estonia cleared the way for Kremlin economic sanctions such as those levied against Lithuania. As a result of its independence proclamation, Lithuania was deprived of Soviet crude oil shipments and of much of the natural gas it used to receive via pipeline connections with the Soviet hinterland.

Gorbachev’s actions, like those of the anti-independence demonstrators, were likely hastened by the three Baltic presidents’ decision Saturday to form a “united front” to strive for restoration of the sovereignty that their homelands enjoyed after the 1917 Russian Revolution until absorption by the Kremlin in 1940.

To protest the Latvian Parliament’s May 4 declaration that it is moving toward independence, pro-Soviet rallies were also reported at 90 factories and firms throughout the republic of 2.7 million people. A Riga demonstration was told that 80 enterprises were on strike, but Interfax said that public transit, stores and offices were operating normally in the city, the largest in the Baltic region with more than 900,000 inhabitants.

The disturbance in Riga, headquarters of the Baltic military district, followed ominous warnings from the Soviet military about the recent course of events in the republics, where tens of thousands of troops from other regions are stationed.

This month, a Communist Party conference of the Soviet air force in the Baltic district gave voice to soldiers’ worries by sending an appeal to Gorbachev.

“The patience of soldiers and members of their families is not without limit,” the document adopted May 5 said. “To respond to the acts of anti-Soviet forces, we will be forced to search for countermeasures that correspond to the situation and to our possibilities.”

Soviet officers stationed in the region have said their frustrations range from the public opprobrium they and their families are often subject to as members of an “occupying” military force, to worries about the security concerns that Baltic independence would raise for the Kremlin.

Baltic residents add another: Life is better in their westward-looking lands than on an army base in a dusty backwater of Kazakhstan, so few career soldiers would willingly go.

“We are being insulted, we are getting hateful phone calls,” Soviet army Col. Konstantin G. Golubev, chief political officer in Lithuania, told a news conference Monday in Vilnius. “Many officers are forced to use civilian clothes to get to their jobs, where they must change into uniforms.”

He said an outbreak of soldiers’ anger was very possible.

“Discontent among the officer corps is growing. It is already powerful enough and, let’s face it, it is not always controllable or will yield to orders from above. Under certain circumstances, it could get out of control completely,” Golubev said.