Showdown on Lithuania Due This Weekend

Under threat of even harsher sanctions from Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Lithuania’s leaders this weekend will decide whether to backtrack and suspend their declaration of independence, the breakaway republic’s prime minister said Friday.

In return, Kazimiera Prunskiene told reporters, she is seeking Kremlin guarantees that a month-old economic “blockade” against her Baltic homeland will cease and that Soviet soldiers stationed there will not commit acts of intimidation against Lithuania’s government or its 3.8 million people.

Prunskiene, received by Gorbachev and Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov on Thursday night, held more than an hour of talks Friday with visiting Secretary of State James A. Baker III and called for Western countries to take a role in safeguarding her republic’s sovereignty.

She said that, after meeting with Gorbachev, she finally understood there is no sympathy in Kremlin leadership circles for Lithuania’s secession bid. And she asked foreign governments, including the United States, to “influence the Soviet Union so talks might start and (so) that there will be no attempt to bring us back to the status” of a Soviet republic.

Prunskiene’s meeting with Gorbachev was the highest-level contact since the Lithuanian Parliament declared its independence from the Soviet Union on March 11, and it led to agreement on at least a tentative basis for negotiations to end the crisis that ensued.

At the U.S. ambassador’s residence, the Lithuanian prime minister filled in Baker on the talks, and a senior State Department official said Baker left Spaso House “with the impression that each side is working hard to find a way to a dialogue, (but) they are not there yet.”

Baker told reporters he had also had a “full discussion” of the Baltic question in wide-ranging talks with Gorbachev. The United States has never recognized the incorporation by the Soviet Union in 1940 of formerly independent Lithuania and the two other Baltic republics, Estonia and Latvia, but U.S. officials are weighing how much pressure to put on Gorbachev in favor of their independence.

While professing support for the three republics’ right to self-determination, they say much pushing could destabilize the Soviet leader’s position.

In arriving at a formula for negotiations with the Lithuanians, the Kremlin leadership would not only defuse the gravest political crisis in Gorbachev’s five-year tenure as Soviet leader, but also chart a path for the two other Baltic states to pursue the more gradual course to independence they have chosen.

The dangers for Soviet law and order in the region were shown this week when pro-Moscow demonstrators, including many ethnic Russians, tried to storm parliament buildings in Estonia and Latvia to oppose secession.

Residents of those republics said tensions were still high Friday, and Tass, the official Soviet news agency, said special “operational groups” of police had been sent in by the Interior Ministry in Moscow to ensure Soviet laws are obeyed.

Meanwhile, in Lithuania, anti-secession militants of the Russian-led Interfront group rallied and handed out leaflets accusing Prunskiene and her government of causing unemployment and food shortages. Ruta Gasenite, a journalist in the capital of Vilnius, said there was practically no hot water for lack of fuel oil or natural gas to heat it, and that shop shelves were “half-empty” because delivery trucks were halting their runs.

Because of Kremlin economic sanctions decreed in April, Lithuanian reserves of gasoline and other oil products are forecast to run out next week as a result of a halt in crude oil deliveries.

Prunskiene said that, during her talks with Gorbachev and Ryzhkov, “I heard the opinion that the measures could be even more brutal if we don’t behave ourselves reasonably.”

Asked to elaborate, she told reporters crammed into a fourth-floor hall at the Lithuanian mission in Moscow that both Soviet leaders issued the threat “indirectly and directly.”

Tens of thousands of Lithuanians are already said to be jobless because of factory shutdowns caused by energy shortages, and the prospect of more Kremlin pressure on the Lithuanian economy would be a disturbing prospect for Prunskiene, an economist by profession.

She had come to Moscow with proposals for a compromise to end the stalemate over secession, but found the Soviet leadership adamant in its demand that the republic’s Parliament, which voted the independence proclamation, act now to freeze or suspend it. At a special session today, lawmakers will consider it, she said.

“We are ready tomorrow to discuss very specifically in Parliament the position of the Soviet Union,” Prunskiene said. “That is to say, an appeal to suspend the declaration itself, the independence acts themselves and to take a decision after the subject has been specifically discussed.”

Prunskiene called, however, for guarantees from Soviet leaders that during ensuing negotiations “there will be no compulsion and pressure through various means, like the use of the army and economic measures, to force us to arrive at agreements profitable to them.”

Judging by the remarks she made, however, the Lithuanians could also be planning to make Gorbachev a counteroffer. Prunskiene said she had spoken by telephone with Lithuania’s president, Vytautas Landsbergis, after meeting with Gorbachev and that “our personal intentions . . . remain the same.”

In that vein, she said it would be “risky” for Lithuanians to limit the effectiveness of the independence declaration.

Gorbachev, before meeting with Baker to discuss a wide range of issues, indicated some flexibility to deal with the Lithuanian crisis, but only up to a certain point.

“Through the constitutional process, we are ready to consider any possibility, any question,” he told reporters at the Kremlin.

The Lithuanians are unlikely to take any comfort from those words, since the “constitutional process” mentioned by Gorbachev would subject them to a recently passed law that sets stiff conditions for secession, including compensation for residents who vacate their property to move elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

At her news conference, Prunskiene emphasized that the Lithuanian leadership did not feel the law applies to them since Lithuania was forcibly absorbed by the Soviet Union rather than freely choosing to become a part of it.