Soviet Soldiers Storm Buildings in Lithuania : Baltic unrest: Printing plant, guard headquarters seized under Gorbachev decree. Republic still defiant.

Soviet troops seized the headquarters of the Lithuanian national guard and the republic’s main printing plant Friday following a warning by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev that he is determined to restore the central government’s authority here.

Paratroopers stormed the guard headquarters outside Vilnius in a dawn raid, shooting out its windows, firing tear-gas grenades and forcing the staff out of the building at gunpoint, according to Lithuanian authorities.

Other soldiers, firing their assault rifles into the air and backed by massive T-72 battle tanks, then smashed their way into the capital’s press center, again forcing the staff into the streets. Lithuanian nationalists who had come to protect the building were beaten and tear-gassed, witnesses said.

“What they are doing is an undeclared war against the Republic of Lithuania,” President Vytautas Landsbergis said in a radio broadcast. “Our land is again under the bloody hand of aggression.”

Seven men were wounded in the clashes, according to the Lithuanian Health Ministry. They included a Lithuanian official reportedly shot by the paratroopers’ commander at the national guard headquarters, two other men shot in the takeover of the printing plant and a truck driver whose vehicle was crushed by a tank. Many others were reportedly beaten.

Landsbergis twice telephoned Gorbachev in Moscow to appeal for a halt to the actions but was told that the Soviet president was unavailable, according to a Lithuanian government spokeswoman. He left a message asking Gorbachev to “stop Soviet soldiers spilling blood in the streets.”

Soviet authorities said later that the troops were acting under a presidential decree to recover property of the central government, the Communist Party and other organizations that nationalists here and in other republics had taken over during the last year.

Gorbachev had warned Lithuania on Thursday that he would impose direct rule on the republic, removing its elected government, unless it restored Soviet power and complied with national laws.

But Landsbergis, speaking on Lithuanian television, remained defiant Friday evening. “We will remain together, holding on to our land, language, traditions and faith,” he said, seeking to rally his countrymen. “From our spirit once again will rise Lithuania the eternal, which stands unbowed by all misfortune as long as one Lithuanian remains alive.”

He also appealed to Western governments for support. “This is the same war as in the (Persian) gulf, only this time it is in Europe,” Landsbergis told French television. “Why don’t Western governments get on the hot line to Gorbachev?

“Today in Vilnius, soldiers shot at people, tanks charged at people,” he said. “Only God’s intervention prevented deaths. But the Soviet empire, unfortunately, needs human lives.”

Lithuania was one of the three Baltic republics annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940. Its nationalist government declared the republic’s independence from the Soviet Union last March.

Supporters of the Vilnius government poured into the streets of the capital by the thousands Friday, as they had almost every day this week as Moscow increased its pressure.

Human chains were formed around the Parliament building, the television center and tower and other strategic sites in an effort to prevent their seizure. Catholic priests conducted services for the 10,000 people massed outside Parliament and prayed for independence.

Ausra Kalariene, a 37-year-old physician from Kaunas, summed up the mood of the crowd. “Freedom has now inspired us, and we cannot retreat from it,” she said. “We will never retreat from it.”

As midnight came, the people remained in an all-night vigil, alternately singing hymns and listening to rock music. Scores of Lithuania’s yellow, green and red flags shone in the floodlights and bonfires around the central square.

“For us, protecting the Parliament is everything,” said Jonas Valaitis, 39, an engineer from Kaunas. “All Lithuanians would be here if it were necessary. If we did not come, what would we tell our children?”

Aleksas Strelciunos, 60, who came with his wife from Kaunas, said: “I was born in a free Lithuania, and I will die in a free Lithuania. If need be, we will die on this square. We have two grandsons, and we are doing this so they will live better than we have.”

Inside the Parliament building, volunteers began making Molotov cocktails, gasoline-filled bottles with cloth wicks ready for lighting, and officials passed out gas masks--both in preparation for an assault they now expect from the Soviet troops.

And the Lithuanian government, determined to stand its ground after the day’s events, began to swear in several hundred of its civilian employees, along with volunteers, as soldiers of the republic’s small national guard. Although the guard is intended to be an armed force, officials said the soldiers will not carry weapons, initially.

Protests by pro-Moscow groups, most of them made up of minority Russians and Poles, also grew Friday with a large counter-rally that demanded the resignation of the Landsbergis government or the imposition of presidential rule.

Workers from 23 major enterprises are now on strike, demanding the government’s removal. The employees of the Ignalina atomic power plant in northern Lithuania threatened Friday to shut it down, reducing the republic’s power supply substantially, if the Vilnius government does not quit.

The pro-Moscow faction of the Lithuanian Communist Party, in whose name the printing plant was seized, demanded the government’s resignation and called for the formation of a Committee for the Salvation of Lithuania that would be ready to seize power.

Other troops seized buildings in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city, and in outlying areas that were being used by Lithuanian home-defense units. Among the buildings captured was the Vilnius office of the Lithuanian Hunting and Fishing Society, where the target was the files of Lithuanians with licensed weapons.

In Vilnius, columns of light tanks, armored cars and trucks of soldiers again patrolled the city through the day and well into the night, and occasional gunfire was heard around midnight.

Although Soviet authorities denied that paratroopers recently dispatched to Lithuania to round up draft evaders and military deserters were being used in the operation, videotapes taken at the printing plant clearly showed the paratroopers firing live ammunition and then using their rifles to beat back the crowds.

Rafik Nishanov, the chairman of the Council of Nationalities of the Soviet Parliament, warned in Moscow that Lithuania is heading for “a civil, internecine war.” The acceptance of Gorbachev’s appeal is the only way to calm the situation, Nishanov said.

Although neither the Soviet constitution nor recent legislation increasing Gorbachev’s powers defines “presidential rule,” it would apparently involve the suspension or removal of the government here, with Moscow installing its own officials and probably deploying troops and police from outside Lithuania to carry out its orders.

News of the paratroopers’ assault reached Riga, the capital of neighboring Latvia, as more than 2,000 women gathered in a downtown park to protest the Soviet military’s plans to use force if necessary to draft their sons, husbands and brothers.

Some women wept openly at the news. The crowd somberly sang the Latvian national anthem.

Dahlburg reported from Vilnius and Parks from Moscow.

NEWS SERVICE CLOSED: The government locks an independent Soviet news agency out of its Moscow offices. A27