11 Die as Soviets Take Lithuania TV Center : Baltic unrest: 110 injured as army smashes citizens’ defenses. Pro-Kremlin faction says it is assuming power.

Soviet paratroopers, in a blaze of armored might and firepower, seized Lithuania’s radio and television center early today as Moscow tightened its hold on the Baltic republic in an effort to halt its drive for independence. Eleven people were reported killed and 110 wounded.

Moving under a hail of gunfire, the troops broke through the makeshift defenses set up by more than 1,000 people who had gathered earlier to protect the hilltop center, and tanks fired at least four times over the heads of the defenders to force them to retreat.

Gunfire echoed across much of the city and loud explosions were heard in various other areas as the troops apparently moved on other targets. Columns of tanks, armored cars and other vehicles moved along the major roads at high speed, and helicopters crisscrossed overhead.

The troops appeared intent on installing the Committee for National Salvation, formed three days ago by the small pro-Soviet faction of the Lithuanian Communist Party, as the new government.

After troops took over the broadcast center, Radio Vilnius came back on the air briefly, telling Lithuanians that the committee was assuming power in the republic, and army sound trucks moved through the city broadcasting the same message as dawn broke. The committee said it would hold a news conference today to announce its program.

“We declare the Committee for National Salvation has taken power,” the announcement said. “Lithuania will be free. You were deceived. Go home to your families and children.”

The Lithuanian Supreme Council, the republic’s Parliament, was summoned by President Vytautas Landsbergis and went into emergency session that continued through the night as thousands of its supporters flocked into central Vilnius despite the darkened streets and the military convoys.

“I think this is the beginning of the end of Lithuanian independence,” said Dr. Heronimas Maskyalyunas, former dean of medicine at Vilnius University. “But all Lithuanians remain ready to die for this.”

As the republic’s radio station was forced off the air, an announcer said: “We address all who hear us. It is possible to break us physically using force or to close our mouths, but nobody can force us to renounce freedom and independence.”

The Supreme Council authorized Algirdas Saudargas, the Lithuanian foreign minister, who is in Poland on a visit, to form a government in exile if the present government is ousted.

The army’s action was by far the deadliest in President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s determined effort to block Lithuania’s campaign for independence. Until this week, when the Soviet military began to seize Lithuanian government facilities, there had been almost no violence here since the Lithuanian Parliament declared its independence from Moscow last March.

Three people were killed outside the broadcast center, as the paratroopers opened fire on the unarmed crowd, witnesses said. Five more people died inside as the troops fought through the center and up the television tower, according to a correspondent for the independent Baltic News Service who was at work there.

“The firing was nonstop,” the correspondent said. “This was not wild, shoot-anything firing, but continuous firing trained at anything in their way. They knew that people would be killed.”

More than 1,000 supporters of the nationalist government had been keeping an all-night vigil at the center in the belief that their numbers would prevent an assault.

But the column of 30 tanks and armored cars kept rolling as the Lithuanians tried to stop them, witnesses said, and at least one man was crushed beneath the first tank. Then the troops opened fire, first over the heads of the Lithuanians and then into the crowd, according to the witnesses.

“The tanks were coming and shooting, coming and shooting,” Longina Myasavechene said. “We had no arms, but they shot. We raised our hands, and the soldiers beat us.”

The Lithuanian government’s information bureau, quoting reports from city hospitals, put the casualties at 11 dead and 110 wounded, but said ambulances were still bringing people in from the center and other parts of the city.

Paratroopers already had seized other facilities Saturday in a campaign that began early last week and quickly gathered force, apparently with the intent of replacing the Landsbergis government with one loyal to the Kremlin.

“Marionettes in Lithuania are being prepared for their role,” Landsbergis said. Foreign armed might “is massing against us.”

Pro-Soviet and Communist Party loyalists, meanwhile, expressed brash confidence that they would soon replace the government, which was the first of any of the Soviet Union’s constituent republics to proclaim its independence.

“A process of the transfer of power in controlling the republic is under way,” said Juozas Jarmalavicius, an official with the Committee for National Salvation. “It will not be long. Of course, the committee can count on victory.”

Gorbachev warned Lithuania last week that he would impose “presidential rule” on the republic, apparently removing the elected government, ruling by decree and enforcing Soviet laws with troops, if necessary, to restore Soviet authority here.

But Lithuanian officials thought they had won time to negotiate with the Kremlin after the meeting in Moscow on Saturday of the Council of the Federation, which is now the Soviet Union’s highest policy-making body and which called at its meeting for a political resolution of the dispute.

The council, rejecting a report by Soviet Interior Minister Boris Pugo justifying the deployment of troops here on grounds of restoring order, decided to send a five-member “mission of goodwill” to assess the situation in Lithuanian and suggest possible compromises.

“This will give us at least three or four days of breathing space,” said Egidijus Bichkauskas, Lithuania’s observer at the session, “but we have no guarantees that the military will suspend its actions.”

Led by Boris N. Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, the country’s largest constituent republic, one leader after another denounced the violence with which the military had been seizing government buildings here under a presidential decree to return them to the Communist Party and central government agencies.

Describing the central government’s use of military force against civilians as “impermissible,” Yeltsin warned the Council of the Federation: “This can cause the escalation of violence in this and other regions and unleash large-scale civil conflict.”

Yeltsin called for the withdrawal of the troops dispatched recently to Lithuania and the other Baltic republics, guarantees from Gorbachev and other leaders that further force will not be used and immediate talks between the central government and Lithuanian representatives to resolve outstanding issues.

Yeltsin’s call was endorsed almost unanimously, according to participants in the meeting, and, to Gorbachev’s apparent surprise, no one supported Pugo in his argument on the need to restore law and order as well as uphold Soviet power in the republic.

“Members of the Council of the Federation understood that the use of force in the Baltic republics today could turned into the use of force in their republics tomorrow,” Bichkauskas said.

But Leonid Kravchuk, the politically conservative Ukrainian president, told reporters that the Council of the Federation would oppose any replacement of the present Landsbergis government, except through elections, as “against the will of the people.”

The Council of the Federation’s mission, which was due here today, is headed by Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the Armenian president and former political prisoner, and Nikolai Dementei, the president of neighboring Byelorussia.

Dahlburg reported from Vilnius and Parks from Moscow.