Militant Soviet Moldovans Besiege Border Posts : Ethnic unrest: Friction in the southwestern republic balloons into a revolt against Communist rule.

Moldovan militants by the thousands besieged checkpoints on the Soviet-Romanian frontier Wednesday and threatened to massacre KGB border guards as an ethnic quarrel in the southwestern Soviet Union ballooned into revolt against Communist rule, reports from state-run media said.

“People are destroying Lenin monuments and hate everything associated with the Soviet Union, Soviet army and Communist Party,” Yuri Roshka, first deputy chairman of the Popular Front, a grass-roots organization, reported from Moldova’s capital of Kishinev. “A mass campaign against the Communist Party is well under way.”

Although reports from Roshka and other Moldovan nationalists could not be independently confirmed and journalists were barred from southern areas of the republic, Soviet media including Pravda confirmed sieges and seizures of party offices.

Although no large-scale acts of violence were reported, events over the past 24 hours in the largely agricultural land where more than 4 million people live marked the latest breakdown of Soviet authority and the Communist Party’s standing in society.

“One clear aim is noticeable behind these and other similar instances of flagrant lawlessness, namely, to excite anti-Communist hysteria to the limit,” V. Tsyra of the Moldovan Communist Party’s Central Committee staff warned.

Matters came to a boil in Moldova last Thursday when a 150,000-member ethnic minority, the Gagauz, began unauthorized elections to create a parliament for their own separate state, which they proclaimed in August after complaining of discrimination by Moldovans.

Reacting swiftly, the nationalist leaders who took power in Kishinev earlier this year nullified the elections and proclaimed a state of emergency. The Kremlin agreed to a request from both sides and dispatched heavily armed Interior Ministry troops to keep the peace.

However, many Moldovans, finally free to utter nationalist demands after decades of repression, accused President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Moscow of blatantly favoring the “Gagauz extremists.” More than 30 busloads of discontented nationalists set out for the Prut River that marks the Soviet-Romanian boundary, the Popular Front reported.

Before sunrise, more than 3,000 nationalists surrounded border checkpoints at Goteshty and Stoyanovka to demand the withdrawal of two regiments of Soviet Interior Ministry troops patrolling the Gagauz area and their replacement by Moldovan police, the official Tass news agency reported. Interfax, an independent news service, said as many as 7,000 Moldovans took part.

At Stoyanovka, crowds showered the checkpoint with rocks and burned down the fence that surrounded it, Tass said.

“The blockaders threatened to annihilate the personnel and their families and to ‘wipe the posts from the Earth,’ ” it reported, quoting officials of the elite KGB unit that guards the Soviet border.

Protesters also threatened to cross into Romania to seek assistance there. Moldovans and Romanians share a common language and heritage, and Moldova--officially called Moldavia until last summer--was part of Romania until the Kremlin annexed it in 1940.

When news of the rampage along the frontier reached Kishinev, a helicopter whisked First Deputy Premier Konstantin Oborok and other top officials to the scene, where they opened talks with the militants, Tass said.

Late last week, as many as 40,000 Moldovans, calling themselves “volunteers,” streamed to the borders of the Gagauz area to challenge the minority group’s independence claim, and reports reaching Moscow indicated that as they return home, they are focusing their hostility on the Communist Party.

In Kishinev, returnees held a mass rally to demand that the Communist Party cease being “the hand of Moscow on Moldovan territory.

Meanwhile, the uneasy dialogue that began last week between Gagauz secessionists and Moldovan regime was institutionalized with the setting up of a “bilateral conciliatory commission.”

Moldova’s Gagauz are Turkic-speaking Orthodox Christians whose ancestors fled from northeastern Bulgaria to present-day Moldova to escape Ottoman rule during and after the Russo-Turkish war of 1806-1812.