Lithuanian Government Quits Amid Turmoil : Soviet Union: The move comes as thousands try to storm Parliament over food price boosts.

The government of the Soviet republic of Lithuania resigned Tuesday after several thousand angry workers attempted to storm the Parliament to protest increased food prices and lawmakers inside the building criticized the government’s moderate approach in negotiations for the republic’s independence from Moscow.

Prime Minister Kazimiera Prunskiene, who has been in the forefront of Lithuania’s struggle for independence from the Soviet Union for the past year, cited her growing differences with the Lithuanian Parliament both on economic reforms and on her desire to avoid confrontations with Moscow where possible.

“Our views have conceptual differences,” she told the deputies in her resignation speech. “They began to differ for the first time in May and June when the policy of negotiations with the Soviet Union was being formed. We avoided a crisis then, but now that crisis has come.”

And with the acceptance of Prunskiene’s resignation by a vote of 72 to 8, with 22 lawmakers abstaining, the Lithuanian Supreme Council gave the republic’s government an even sharper nationalist character and took what appeared to be a step closer to confrontation with Moscow.

“There is tension running across the city and a fear that those opposed to independence will use the government crisis to provoke something,” the Lithuanian news agency ELTA reported from Vilnius, the capital, Tuesday evening.

Tensions are already high throughout the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania after the central government’s decision on Monday to send paratroopers there and to other troubled areas to round up draft evaders and military deserters.

“The situation is whipped up, and the consequences could be most serious--blood could flow,” Estonian Prime Minister Edgar Savissar told reporters in Moscow.

Denouncing the crackdown on draft evasion as “a pretext for a large-scale attack on Latvian democratic institutions,” the Latvian Parliament on Tuesday ordered the republic’s officials and citizens not to cooperate in the Soviet army conscription campaign, which got under way on Tuesday with a dragnet for draft-age youths.

Both Latvia and Estonia took youths off construction sites and other alternative service projects and urged them to go into hiding, as Lithuania had already told its draft-age men.

In Moscow, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s spokesman defended the measures as necessary to uphold the authority of the central government as well as to provide the Soviet army, the world’s largest, with conscripts.

“It would have been better, of course, if the draft went as usual with symbols of patriotism, music and flowers,” Vitaly N. Ignatenko, the president’s press secretary, told reporters. “But it did not.”

Suspicions are widespread throughout the region, however, that Gorbachev, bowing to strong right-wing pressure, intends to crack down hard on the Baltic republics, halting their drives for independence and demonstrating the firmness of his leadership.

“The war of nerves we had last spring has returned,” a Lithuanian government spokesman in Vilnius said. “We are just waiting for the soldiers to get their orders to oust us. . . . Of course, people will resist, and then there will be bloodshed.”

A military column of 108 vehicles, including light tanks, armored cars and trucks full of troops in combat gear, had rumbled through Vilnius, waking residents early Tuesday, according to Lithuanian officials, who described it as an attempt at intimidation.

To many Baltic leaders, the tough new measures appear to be timed to coincide with the Persian Gulf crisis.

“We are witnessing an attempt by the Soviet Union to create a new regional conflict,” Savissar charged. “The crisis in the gulf offers the best possible moment to suppress the Baltic states’ drive for independence.”

In Vilnius, the conflict was raw and bitter around the Parliament building on Tuesday, a taste of what will come in the struggle to reshape the Soviet Union.

About 7,000 pro-Moscow demonstrators, mostly ethnic Russians and Poles who work in the city’s factories, had begun their protest outside the building early Tuesday to denounce three-fold increases in food prices, charging that the drive for independence is bringing ruin to the republic.

Prunskiene, a 47-year-old economist who had been Lithuania’s most popular politician, raised food prices Monday in response to Lithuania’s higher costs for products it purchases from other republics and in what she saw as an essential step toward broad economic reform.

While pensioners and others with low incomes had been compensated with income increases of 25% to 60%, relatively well-paid factory workers received little or nothing in additional pay.

But Prunskiene spoke only of her continuing differences with the ultranationalist deputies in Parliament and their criticism of her efforts to maintain an open dialogue with the Kremlin.

She had just returned from Moscow, where she met with Gorbachev for 30 minutes to discuss the roundup of draft evaders and deserters, and she believed that she had convinced him of the need to defuse the crisis.

“Prunskiene’s resignation means that we will now see a move toward greater nationalism,” said Algimantas Cekuolis, a deputy and leader of Sajudis, the Lithuanian nationalist movement.

With the demonstrators still in the square outside demanding their resignations, however, the deputies centered their attacks on the price increases, and they voted to overturn the government’s decision with the same alacrity that they accepted Prunskiene’s resignation.

There had been tense moments prior to the session when the pro-Moscow demonstrators surged through police lines and attacked the Parliament building, according to the independent news service Baltfax.

They broke down the heavy metal doors to the building and were clearly intent on capturing the building--about 100 demonstrators had already burst in--before police used fire hoses to disperse them, Baltfax reported.

President Vytautas Landsbergis, alarmed that pro-Moscow forces were about to overrun the Parliament building, had already appealed in an emergency radio broadcast for Lithuanian nationalist supporters to come to the square to “defend our democracy.”

The two groups clashed repeatedly with each other and with the police, Baltfax reported, and they appear likely to renew the confrontation today, when they are planning to demonstrate again outside Parliament.

Responding to a further appeal by Landsbergis, several thousand people massed around the Parliament as night fell in Vilnius to protect the building.

To many Baltic politicians, all this appears a carefully plotted Kremlin scenario to justify the introduction of presidential rule in the republics--and the suppression of their independence movements.

Times staff writers John-Thor Dahlburg, in Riga, Latvia, and Carey Goldberg, in Moscow, contributed to this story.

SHAKE--UP IN THE BALTICS

Lithuanian Prime Minister Kazimiera Prunskiene was in the forefront of Lithuania’s struggle for independence from the Soviet Union. She resigned after workers tried to storm the republic’s Parliament building, heightening tensions as Soviet troops entered the city under orders to round up draft evaders and military deserters.