Baltic Republics’ Pro-Soviet Groups Ask Kremlin for ‘Presidential’ Rule : Independence: Mysterious committees of unidentified officials in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia want governments to give up their powers.

Lithuania’s mysterious Committee of National Salvation issued a savage warning Tuesday to the republic’s beleaguered government, demanding it give up its powers, as Communists and military hard-liners intensified their push for the removal of nationalist governments throughout the Baltic states.

The committee, in a statement issued through the pro-Soviet Lithuanian Communist Party, called on President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to impose “presidential rule” on the republic, replacing its elected government with appointed administrators empowered to rule by decree.

The committee, which has yet to identify any of its officials or declare its program, accused Lithuania’s nationalist government of attempting the “physical annihilation” of its opponents, planning pogroms against the Russian and Polish minorities and pushing the republic into a “bloody war.”

“The smallest attempt on the lives, honor and dignity of citizens of the Soviet Union, of Communists, of the families of servicemen and all those whom the current fascist regime cannot tolerate will inescapably evoke the most decisive retaliatory measures,” the statement threatened.

In Estonia and Latvia, pro-Soviet groups joined the call for the Kremlin to impose presidential rule, in what appeared to be a coordinated campaign to replace the pro-independence governments of all three Baltic states.

In the Latvian capital of Riga, commandos from the Soviet Interior Ministry attacked the republic’s police academy at 2 a.m. Tuesday, stripping it of firearms and grenade launchers after the local military commander ordered republican authorities to surrender all weapons.

More than 12,000 pro-Soviet hard-liners rallied to demand immediate intervention by the Soviet army to prevent the restoration there of a “bourgeois dictatorship.”

“Now is the decisive moment--we are on the brink of disaster,” Ojars Potreki, a leader of the Latvian Communist Party, told the rally. “The government is leading us to a bourgeois dictatorship.”

Only the National Salvation Committee of Latvia, as shadowy a group as that with the same name here, could avert this, Petreki said, calling on it to assume power.

Latvian President Anatolijs Gorbunovs ordered women and children to stay away from the center of Riga, and gas masks were handed out to pro-independence workers in the heavily barricaded downtown. Many people were seen carrying sticks, suggesting they would try to resist an attack.

In Estonia, where pro-Soviet groups have demanded the dissolution of Parliament and the establishment of an “administration of national unity,” which would include Communist Party officials and representatives of the Russian minority, a strike has been called for Thursday.

In an attempt to forestall a confrontation like that in Lithuania, where 14 people were killed in the Soviet army’s weekend seizure of government broadcasting facilities, the Estonian government froze prices, meeting one of the opposition demands.

About 5,000 Soviet loyalists rallied in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to condemn the pro-independence government there.

“We are afraid that the escalation of military action can also reach Estonia,” Marju Lauristin, the deputy speaker of the Estonian Parliament, said. “This wave is coming from the south (Lithuania) to us in the north. . . . The situation here is becoming quite acute.”

In Moscow, Gorbachev told the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, that the Baltic crisis was escalating so quickly that “the situation has become difficult to predict. We must act--the center and the republics--to ensure the security of the people,” he said.

Gorbachev blamed the crisis on nationalists in the three Baltic republics, contending that their drive to leave the Soviet Union and the discrimination against all those opposing secession had plunged the region into conflict.

Gorbachev also attacked Boris N. Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Federation, the country’s largest republic, for backing the Baltic nationalists and urging Russians in the Soviet armed forces to refuse to obey orders to fire on civilians or intervene in political disputes.

Yeltsin’s statement was “a gross violation of the Soviet constitution,” Gorbachev said, and “ . . . adds further seeds of confrontation to the already heated, tense situation in the country.”

In Vilnius, the nationalist government’s pro-independence supporters worked nonstop Tuesday to fortify the Parliament building on the banks of the Neringa River against a Soviet ground attack.

In a field north of the building, an excavator cut a 15-foot deep trench to stop tanks. A jumble of concrete beams was dumped on the road that runs between the Parliament building and the river. The only entrance that had remained open, on that side, has now been blocked with concrete cubes more than 5 feet tall that were still being stacked on top of each other at nightfall. The defenders acknowledged, however, that such precautions would do nothing to stymie a helicopter-borne attack on to the building’s flat roof.

Inside, violet-colored dog tags were handed out to the young men guarding the office of Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis. They said the tags carried their blood type for use in case they were wounded and their names so they could be identified in case they were killed.

The number of defenders has shrunk as Lithuanian officials, shocked at the readiness of the Soviet military to use its firepower, have been dissuading attempts to keep the Parliament protected by a human wall. At dusk, only about 80 defenders appeared to be in the building.

Landsbergis, who has not left the building since the army attack on the main broadcasting center early Sunday, said the Baltic crackdown had been timed to occur while world attention was diverted by the Persian Gulf crisis.

By the time the West realized what had happened, he said, “a red military fascism . . . will be the triumphant masters of the situation.”

He pleaded with the world to postpone military actions against Iraq so as not to draw attention away from the plight of his government.

Such a pause would clarify the exact intentions and political position of Gorbachev, Landsbergis told The Times in the lobby of his office.

“The devil’s plan, well-coordinated in its time schedule, is now coming to its realization,” Landsbergis said.

Dahlburg reported from Vilnius and Parks from Moscow.