Baltic States Hope Summit Will Reaffirm U.S. Support : Secession: The leaders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania want Bush to pressure Gorbachev.

The fine print on official U.S. maps denies this is part of the Soviet Union, and when President Bush meets Mikhail S. Gorbachev next week, many in the Baltic republics--Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia--want him not to forget it.

“The West has always regarded the U.S.S.R. as its greatest threat,” Eugen Pyat, a member of the Estonian People’s Front, said. “So why can’t it destroy the U.S.S.R. and ensure that it will never again regain its strength or brandish its fist by helping the little, harmless states--Estonia among them?”

Only dimly known entities for many Americans, the mini-republics on the Baltic coast have surged into the headlines to become the source of Gorbachev’s gravest constitutional crisis and a divisive issue in U.S.-Soviet affairs as the summit in Washington nears.

Many here are looking to the Bush-Gorbachev meeting for a vocal reaffirmation of U.S. support and greater pressure on the Kremlin to let them go their own way.

“We pin our hopes on the summit, in the sense that it will spark real negotiations between Moscow and the Baltic republics,” said Sarmite Elerte, chief of the information department of Latvia’s Supreme Soviet, or Parliament.

Broad-based nationalist movements have now come to power in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, ironically thanks to the greater freedoms and more democratic elections championed by Gorbachev, and all three newly elected legislatures have proclaimed their intention of exercising the right of secession granted them by the Soviet Constitution.

In Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, a billboard erected in a park gives expression to a widely shared feeling: “Lithuania without sovereignty is Lithuania without a future!” Change the name, and many Latvians and Estonians would say as much about their homelands.

Lithuania, the most populous of the three as well as the biggest, has pushed the Kremlin hardest with its unilateral declaration of independence more than two months ago. Gorbachev’s reaction has been an order to Lithuanians to surrender private firearms, intimidation by the Soviet army and a partial economic blockade.

Seen from Moscow, the conduct of the new leaders in Vilnius is infuriating. One of the 15 constituent Soviet republics, by a single vote in its Parliament, unilaterally severed ties with the rest of the country, taking billions of rubles worth of state assets and tens of thousands of people who oppose secession along with it.

“The mistake our friends in the Baltic republics make is that they first decide and then they say: ‘We want dialogue,’ ” Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze has said.

Bush has acknowledged that the dispute over Lithuania “certainly puts some tension on the summit.” On Thursday, he told British Broadcasting Corp. television in an interview: “I would be misleading you if I didn’t say the inability to get dialogue going there between the Lithuanians and the Soviets does cause a lot of concern to a lot of us here in the United States.”

With five days to go until Gorbachev’s arrival in Washington, there is no sign the Soviets are preparing to restore the flow of crude oil and natural gas to Vilnius, and energy stocks this week were so low that a halt was ordered to all gasoline sales to private motorists.

Although the Lithuanians this week refused to accede to a key Gorbachev demand--suspension of the independence act--there was a sudden opening in the storm clouds Thursday when, according to journalists from the Baltic republic, the Soviet president told a Lithuanian delegation that he could envision a negotiated secession for their homeland in as a little as two years.

“Without the Baltics (crisis), we would not have a serious problem with the Soviets,” a senior U.S. Administration official commented.

How to respond puts the Americans, Bush included, in a bind. They do not want to do anything to undermine Gorbachev at a time when his five-year-old reform campaign faces growing opposition at home. But they want to avoid anything that might appear to be a U.S. blessing of Soviet hegemony over the region annexed by dictator Josef Stalin in 1940.

The United States, like some other Western nations, never recognized the Kremlin’s annexation of the three states, whose populations total 8 million.

“We now expect political support,” Elerte said in an interview. “We hope that Western democracies will keep the promise at last.”

Bush originally pondered sanctions against Moscow as a way of obtaining gentler treatment for Lithuania but dropped the idea after virtually all U.S. allies warned him not to do anything to harm Gorbachev.

Bush himself has voiced concern that Gorbachev could be vulnerable to opposition from Soviet military leaders, who have not hidden their disquiet at events in the Baltics. Gorbachev reportedly told Secretary of State James A. Baker III last week that he did not have “a lot of room to maneuver” on the Baltics, presumably meaning he feels hemmed in by hard-liners.

The Senate, however, has urged Bush not to grant better trade relations to the Soviet Union until the economic crackdown on Lithuania ceases.

For Kremlin officials, there is no reason why what they view as a purely internal matter should complicate superpower commerce or relations in general.

But with the dispute wearing into its third month, signs are unmistakable that the Soviets, eager to limit the damage in both domestic and foreign affairs, are seeking a way out.