Gorbachev, Lithuanian Prime Minister Meet

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev met with Lithuanian Prime Minister Kazimiera Prunskiene for more than an hour tonight to discuss a compromise proposal on independence, a Lithuanian official said.

The Lithuanian compromise, approved by the republic’s Parliament on Wednesday, for the first time offers a transition period to independence and suggests talks on practical matters such as defense issues and Soviet property in the republic.

A spokeswoman at the Lithuanian mission in Moscow said Prunskiene delivered a letter from the Parliament to Gorbachev and had been meeting with him for more than an hour.

No details of the meeting were released.

Gorbachev had previously refused to even consider negotiating with Lithuania until the republic annulled, or at least suspended, its unilateral March 11 declaration of independence.

The compromise proposal that Prunskiene brought to Moscow does not meet the demand to withdraw the actual declaration of independence--something the Lithuanians say is non-negotiable--but it does declare the republic is ready to suspend acts implementing independence.

“We are prepared to look for compromises in the sphere of purely pragmatic issues, discuss Lithuania’s participation in the Soviet Union’s defense system and look for possible agreements,” Prunskiene told Tass press agency on her arrival in Moscow this evening.

Gorbachev has promised each of his country’s 15 republics a place in a new confederation of essentially independent states loosely bound under a rewritten constitution.

Prunskiene has just returned from two weeks of meetings with Western leaders.