U.S. Assails Soviet Seizure of Facilities in Lithuania, Latvia

The Bush Administration accused the Kremlin on Thursday of provocative actions in the seizure of Latvia’s main printing plant and a Communist Party-owned building in Lithuania.

“The already tense situation in the Baltic states may be exacerbated by actions not conducive to a peaceful outcome,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said, reading from a prepared statement.

“We don’t have a clear indication of whether the actions were originated locally or at the instruction of the Soviet government,” Boucher said. “Regardless of who initiated these actions, however, we do feel that the Soviet government has the ultimate responsibility for the actions of its security units.”

Although Secretary of State James A. Baker III is known to have warned Moscow privately that a Soviet crackdown on dissent could damage the newly cordial U.S.-Soviet relationship, such criticism has seldom been expressed in public.

The words used Thursday were measured and relatively low-key, but the statement clearly showed Washington’s concern that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev may be turning toward tough measures that could sabotage progress toward East-West detente.

“The United States is concerned about (Wednesday’s) seizure of Latvia’s main printing plant and of the Lithuanian Communist Party Central Committee building by Soviet Interior Ministry troops,” Boucher said. “These actions were provocative.”

Security troops, wearing black berets and armed with automatic weapons, occupied the main newspaper publishing plant in Riga, Latvia’s capital, on Wednesday. Dainis Ivans, deputy chairman of the Latvian Parliament, said that the seizure was “the first step of a major armed action against us.”

The plant prints every major newspaper in Latvia. The local Communist Party claimed that the building housing the plant was party property and that other groups had no right to work there.

Soviet actions in Latvia and Lithuania are especially sensitive in the United States because Washington has never recognized the coerced incorporation of those two previously independent republics or of neighboring Estonia into the Soviet Union in 1940.