Latvian Government Building Stormed : Soviet Union: A largely immigrant throng of 10,000 assails food price increases. It demands that the republic’s prime minister resign.

Russian anger in the Baltic region boiled over Thursday as more than 10,000 people riled by increases in food prices besieged the government headquarters in this Latvian capital and tried repeatedly to take it by storm.

“You’ll Make All of Us Beggars!” read one protest sign hoisted by the unruly crowd outside the Council of Ministers Building, seat of Latvia’s pro-independence government.

The crowd, overwhelmingly composed of ethnic Russians and other immigrants to this Latvian-majority Baltic land, demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Ivars Godmanis, the abolition of government-ordered price increases and new “democratic” elections to sweep Latvian nationalists from power.

“They are pathologically incapable of taking decisions to satisfy the people,” Anatoly G. Alexeyev, chairman of the pro-Moscow and Russian-dominated Interfront group, declared to the protesters, who roared their approval.

As in neighboring Lithuania two days earlier, it was the Latvian government’s decision this year to drastically increase prices on many basic foods that gave anti-separatist, pro-Communist forces a popular and emotional cause to bring thousands of people into the streets.

On Jan. 3, retail prices on bread, meat and dairy products in Latvia were increased. The price of a loaf of bread, for example, rose to 50 kopecks from 18. Despite accompanying compensation payments for each family, the specter of vastly inflated grocery bills has kindled widespread worry and fury.

“Why did they do this? I can’t feed my children now!” a middle-aged Russian woman wearing a brown fur hat shouted, tears streaming down her cheeks as she spoke from the steps of government headquarters.

The demonstrators, many of whom were brought in by the busload from Soviet government-run factories, repeatedly demanded that Godmanis meet them. He emerged through the 12-foot-high metal doors of the Council of Ministers Building and was met by the deafening chorus of thousands shouting: “Resign! Resign!” in Russian.

Flanked by gray-uniformed police, Godmanis, 42, stood uneasily as rally organizers polled the crowd on whether he would be allowed to speak. Hundreds bellowed “Nyet!” and brandished their fists.

As the prime minister turned to go, scores of Russian-speaking vocational school students and other young men, formed up in a wedge, tried to pierce the police cordon and push into the building.

It was the most threatening of at least four attempts to get inside, but police officers shoved the youths back down the steps, pounding some of them with their fists.

The crowd finally dispersed after Alexeyev and the other organizers gave the Latvian leadership until Monday to fulfill their demands. If nothing is done, they said ominously in a written declaration, a “serious civil protest” will result.

Political tensions in Latvia, as in the other Baltic republics, are already white-hot since the Soviet Defense Ministry’s decision this week to use paratroopers to find draft dodgers and army deserters.

Heightening the alarm felt in Riga was Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s demand Thursday that Lithuania rescind all of its laws that violate the Soviet constitution or face the possibility of direct Kremlin rule.