Bush Condemns Soviet Crackdown : Lithuania: He warns further armed repression could set back U.S.-Moscow relations. Summit may be periled.

Condemning the Soviets’ bloody crackdown in Lithuania, President Bush warned Sunday that further armed repression could reverse years of unprecedented progress in Soviet-American relations. His top aides said it also jeopardized Moscow summit talks set for next month.

Bush appealed to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to halt the violence and return to peaceful negotiations to resolve the Kremlin’s dispute with the breakaway Baltic republic over its bid for independence from Moscow.

But he acknowledged that he did not know whether Gorbachev had approved the Red Army’s storming of government buildings and the seizure of a television station in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. Thirteen unarmed civilians were killed and scores wounded in the attack on the station.

“There is no justification for the use of force against peaceful and democratically elected governments,” the President said on returning to the White House from his Camp David, Md., retreat.

“Events like those now taking place in the Baltic states threaten to set back, or perhaps even reverse, the process of reform,” Bush added. “We condemn these acts which would not help but affect our relationship. . . .

“So I ask the Soviet leaders to refrain from further acts that might lead to more violence and loss of life,” the President said.

Other high Administration officials sounded the same theme on Sunday television programs and Secretary of State James A. Baker III, traveling in Europe, said the events in Lithuania were a great tragedy.

Even so, the Administration signaled that it did not want an open break in relations with Moscow, and White House officials said a decision on whether the President would meet with Gorbachev in Moscow on Feb. 11-13 would be put off as long as possible.

“It’s too premature to slam the door,” said one White House aide. “This (crackdown) is one big blip on the screen, but it doesn’t indicate anything all by itself.”

Similarly, a senior Administration official aboard Baker’s plane said: “There are still areas where it is to the mutual advantage of the two countries to try to work things out . . . particularly arms control issues.”

But White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said plans for the summit conference were now “questionable”--an acknowledgement that it could be delayed or canceled if the military repression continued or was ordered in other republics. The date of the summit was already in some doubt due to Bush’s preoccupation with the Persian Gulf situation and the failure to reach agreement on final details of a landmark arms control treaty. But military repression in the Soviet Union could be the final straw and represent much more than a mere delay.

Bush and Gorbachev had hoped to sign a strategic arms reduction treaty at the mid-February meeting.

It was one of the worst setbacks in Soviet-American relations since Gorbachev came to power almost six years ago. Western leaders were euphoric in 1989 when the Soviet Union allowed its Communist allies in Eastern Europe to break away from Moscow’s grip and install elected, democratic governments.

Even before Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze resigned last month, warning against the threat of dictatorship, Kremlinologists said that Gorbachev was making a sharp turn to the right to win support from hard-liners in the government to retain his shaky grip on power.

Leading members of Congress, reacting to the reports from Vilnius, said economic aid to the Soviet Union also would be halted unless such military repression is stopped in Lithuania and not repeated in other Soviet republics seeking independence. At the worst, one senator said, it could bring back a Cold War standoff between Moscow and Washington.

Sen. David L. Boren (D-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the crackdown in Lithuania was being taken “extremely seriously” by American intelligence analysts.

“It would appear that . . . Mr. Gorbachev may well be choosing his own political survival in the short run over the forces of democracy that he’s favored in the past,” Boren told reporters.

“Gorbachev may have unleashed forces here that cannot be controlled in the future,” Boren added. The genie may be out of the bottle, and . . . we could be seeing now the beginnings of the unraveling of the social and political fabric there.

“We have to realize that there are approximately 400,000 Soviet troops still in Eastern Europe,” Boren said. “If repression becomes the order of the day (in the Soviet Union), we have to make absolutely certain that there’s no change of attitude of those (Soviet) forces that are in Eastern Europe where freedom has been won.”

Some members of Congress said the Soviets may have timed the crackdown in Lithuania at a time when they thought the United States would be preoccupied with the mounting threat of a gulf war against Iraq.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) recalled that the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 came when Western nations were absorbed with the failed British and French attempt to seize the Suez Canal.

McCain said the crackdown in Vilnius may be more serious than the gulf crisis in the long run, adding: “It could reverse the entire spectrum of progress we have made with the Soviet Union and could, in the worst-case scenario, reawaken the Cold War, which is something none of us want. The United States has to be very firm in our response to this and stop it now.”

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said it was a “watershed event” that could have an immediate negative impact on Soviet-American efforts to wrap up final details of a strategic arms reduction treaty, known as START.

Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) termed the Red Army’s actions in Lithuania “an absolute outrage” and called for an immediate halt in U.S. credits to the Soviet Union.

“We ought to tell Gorbachev to return his Nobel Peace Prize,” she added.

In a similar vein, White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu said President Bush has made it clear to Gorbachev as recently as last week that Western aid for the Soviet Union depends on continued liberalization of the Soviet political system.

Asked about the effect of the crackdown on next month’s summit, Sununu replied: “We’ll probably have a meeting to discuss specifically what is going on, and (Bush) will make a decision at that time.”

Baker, in a statement issued in Ankara where he was visiting Turkish President Turgut Ozal, said the Soviet action “fundamentally and tragically contradicts the basic principles of perestroika, glasnost and democratization. . . . I am deeply disturbed and saddened by these developments.”

Times staff writer Norman Kempster contributed to this story.