Troops Ordered to Baltics to Capture Draft Dodgers : Soviet Union: Four other restive republics are targeted in a Kremlin effort to enforce national law.

The Soviet Defense Ministry on Monday ordered army paratroopers, reportedly by the thousands, to track down and capture draft dodgers and deserters in restive areas of the country as President Mikhail S. Gorbachev again showed his firm determination to enforce Soviet laws nationwide.

The Defense Ministry said the decision to employ squads of soldiers to dragoon youths into the military ranks had become necessary to ensure the country’s ability to defend itself.

Inductions during the most recent round of nationwide conscription, held in the autumn, tumbled as alarmingly low as 10% of the draftable 18-year-olds in the republic of Georgia, according to official sources.

The crackdown on draft dodging was the latest in a series of Gorbachev’s actions that show the growing clout of traditionally conservative institutions such as the armed forces, the KGB and the Interior Ministry in forcing a tougher Kremlin line on law and order, discipline and security affairs.

The action, which applies specifically to the three Baltic republics and to Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and some regions of the Ukraine, makes a mockery of the republics’ claims of sovereignty or independence, which some leaderships assert should apply to defense as well as the economy.

The Soviet Defense Ministry announcement was greeted with dismay, anger and even foreboding in the Baltic republics, where for weeks rumors of an impending Kremlin crackdown, even a coup by right-wing military officers, have been rampant. Such fears increased markedly last week when Soviet Interior Ministry troops occupied the main printing plant in Latvia.

“This forceful mobilization is just a pretext for introducing a military form of government and various forms of dictatorship,” Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis declared grimly in an address shown on his republic’s television. “Great trouble has come to our country. Their main goal is not to catch a few thousand young men, but to destabilize the situation and provoke clashes.”

Estonian Foreign Minister Lennart Meri said the Kremlin’s action “amounted to something that Central and Western Europe have not seen since the 18th Century--forcible military call-up--in other words, the press gang.”

Young men in the Baltics increasingly view the Soviet army as a foreign occupying force that snuffed out the independence of their homelands 50 years ago. They also dread the brutal barracks hazings that have led to the deaths of innumerable conscripts, a disproportionate number of whom have been Estonian, Lithuanian and Latvian.

The announcement of the concerted operation to catch young men avoiding military service seemingly belied assurances recently given Latvian leaders by the Soviet chief of staff, Gen. Mikhail A. Moiseyev. In comments published Monday by the government newspaper Izvestia, Moiseyev said: “As far as regards the General Staff, we told the representatives of the republic that an increase in the number of troops deployed on the territory of Latvia was not planned.”

On Monday evening, Latvian President Anatoly V. Gorbunov said on television that he had been told earlier that day by Col. Gen. Fyodor M. Kuzmin, head of the Baltic Military District, that Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov had ordered the deployment of 2,000 Soviet army paratroopers, renowned for their toughness, in each of the Baltic republics for operations of “forceful conscription.”

The Defense Ministry, in a communique, said unit commanders were ordered to help the military commissions in charge of overseeing the draft. “For the fulfillment of the ordered tasks, detachments of paratroops are to be used,” the communique added, giving no further details.

In at least two instances, however, the execution of Yazov’s order was apparently postponed by mutual agreement.

Gorbunov said that Kuzmin, in a face-to-face encounter at Baltic Military District headquarters in Riga, Latvia’s capital, promised not to undertake any actions before Sunday, apparently so Latvian leaders can parley with the central government.

In Estonia, the prime minister, Edgar Savisaar, said on television that he and Estonian President Arnold Ruutel sent a telegram to Gorbachev requesting that he cancel Yazov’s order, and were informed by Kuzmin later in the day that no troops will be sent to Estonia before Sunday.

Despite that grace period, Savisaar sounded as gloomy as Landsbergis. “This is not only an attempt to mobilize a few thousand young men, but to introduce martial law in the republic,” the rotund economist told his countrymen.

Gorbunov said he could not guarantee that Kuzmin would keep his word since, he said, the general would be obliged to break it if he received an order to do so.

The Presidium of Lithuania’s Supreme Council, or legislature, voiced angry defiance and indicated that the hunt for draft dodgers had already started: “Forceful conscription, that is to say, the hunting and kidnaping of youths into the U.S.S.R. army, is beginning in Lithuania, as well as Latvia and Estonia,” it said.

The Lithuanian leadership said those practices smacked of the methods of Russia’s czars, who filled the ranks of their armies with abducted serfs, and it cautioned young Lithuanians to change the place where they sleep and to avoid anyone who could be a Soviet soldier in disguise.

Last spring, squads of paratroopers were sent into Lithuania to hunt draft dodgers and AWOL army conscripts after the Landsbergis government declared its independence from Moscow in March.

Yazov has said that 35,000 young men avoided the draft in 1990, most of them in republics where independence movements have fostered anti-military sentiments. In addition, more than 4,300 deserters from the army are reportedly at large, often aided in their flight by the authorities of their home republic.

The issue is highly symbolic since military service is a duty enshrined in the Soviet constitution. Last month, Gorbachev issued a decree upholding the validity of the draft nationwide as a reminder that the central government still is in charge of defense.

Last fall, only 12.5% of Lithuanian youths who should have been inducted into the Soviet army’s ranks showed up for military service, the Defense Ministry said. In Latvia, the figure was 25.3%, and in Armenia, 28.1%.

“On the whole, throughout the country, the conscription plan was fulfilled by 78.8%,” the Defense Ministry communique said. “This negatively affects the staffing of the armed forces of the Soviet Union, puts in danger the resolution of vital questions for the Soviet state on its defense capability. . . . Such a situation cannot be tolerated.”

In a separate decree, Gorbachev voided a decision of Georgia’s nationalist government that abolished the existence of the South Ossetian Autonomous Region, which is trying to get out from under Georgian rule. He also annulled South Ossetia’s independence proclamation, which had enraged the Georgians, and called for the withdrawal of vigilante groups from the disputed region within three days.

Tass, the Soviet news agency, reported Monday night that gunfire and bomb explosions were still being heard in the city of Tskhinvali, where the situation had “sharply deteriorated” due to skirmishes between Ossetians and Georgians. In the past few days, Tass said, two people were killed and more than a dozen wounded in the ethnic strife.