Soviet Troops Occupy Printing Plant in Latvia; Workers Protest

Soviet forces armed with automatic rifles occupied the main newspaper publishing plant in Latvia’s capital Wednesday.

Hundreds of workers at the Press House in Riga protested the Interior Ministry action by laying down their tools and refusing to print newspapers. The journalists voted to begin a sit-down strike.

Press House normally prints all the major independent and official Latvian newspapers, as well as the national dailies Pravda, Izvestia and Komsomolskaya Pravda for distribution in Latvia.

The plant, which employs about 700 printers and 600 journalists, is the largest printing facility in the republic.

Six days ago, the company announced plans to become independent, said its director, Kazimir Dundurs.

“This looks like the first step of a major armed action against us,” said Dainis Ivans, deputy chairman of the Latvian Parliament. Ivans said he was denied entry to the building by the Interior Ministry troops and was told: “One more step forward and we shoot.”

Ivans and other Latvian sources said that 20 to 30 troopers surrounded the plant about 6:30 a.m. They cut off all entrances but allowed journalists and other workers to enter the building after a thorough check of their documents.

Latvian Communist Party leader Alfred P. Rubiks has claimed that the building is party property and that other groups have no right to work there. Interior Ministry officials in Moscow denied giving the order to seize the building, but Ivans said that “such a move would need the Kremlin’s go-ahead, at least tacitly.”

Later, about 10,000 Latvians organized a protest against the “black berets” in front of Communist Party headquarters in Riga, said Vent Kainaizis, a spokesman for the Latvian Popular Front, a pro-independence group.