Lithuania Votes 90% in Favor of Independence

Overwhelmingly rejecting President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s authority and his blueprint for a “common Soviet home,” more than 2 million Lithuanians streamed to the polls on Saturday to confirm their will to be independent.

“The great majority of people in Lithuania no longer have any fear, and once again they have expressed their determination to the world,” Vytautas Landsbergis, the Baltic republic’s president, declared.

“They have said . . . what kind of Lithuania they want to create, what kind of Lithuania they will bequeath to their children.”

At a late night press conference held inside Lithuania’s barricaded Parliament building, election commission chairman Vaclovas Lipvinas said that preliminary returns showed 84.4% of 2.65 million voters cast ballots in Saturday’s republic-wide referendum, with 90.4% in favor of “democratic, independent Lithuania.”

Of the rest, 6.5% voted against independence, and the other ballots were invalidated because they were incorrectly marked, Lipvinas said.

Despite such an indisputable majority for independence, unofficial surveys tabulated by Lithuania’s grass-roots nationalist movement Sajudis showed that the desire of the republic’s ethnic minorities in Lithuania to remain part of the Soviet Union remains unshaken.

And that promises to be a major political headache for the Landsbergis leadership in upcoming negotiations with Moscow on the republic’s political and economic future.

In Salcininku, where more than two-thirds of the population are ethnic Poles, turnout for the plebiscite was very low--only about 19%. According to Sajudis, more than 3,800 people voted for independence there, but that was a tiny fraction of the district’s nearly 29,000 registered voters.

By marking and casting the paper ballots, which were available in Lithuanian, Russian and Polish, people were ignoring a decree issued four days earlier by Gorbachev who declared the Lithuanian referendum illegal and invalidated its results in advance.

Gorbachev accused Lithuania’s leaders, who rode a tide of pro-seccesionist sentiment to victory in republican elections last spring, of trying to sabotage a national referendum, scheduled for March 17, that will solicit Soviet citizens’ approval for “preservation of the Soviet Union as a renewed federation of equal, sovereign republics.”

The results of Saturday’s referendum in Lithuania, although non-binding, clearly showed that the vast majority of people here would prefer the restoration of the independence the Baltic republic lost when the Kremlin annexed it and the neighboring states of Latvia and Estonia in 1940 in a pact with Nazi Germany.

Gorbachev has steadfastly rejected Lithuania’s declaration of independence, made by the republic’s Parliament last March, as illegal under the Soviet constitution.

Although flushed with their victory in the referendum, Landsbergis’ allies acknowledged that the plebiscite’s results would probably not mollify Moscow nor alter its intention to preserve the Soviet Union within its current borders.

“The victory is clear--but what are we going to do with it?” Vilnius journalist Algimantas Cekuolis, a quasi-official spokesman for the Landsbergis government, commented.

The display of popular backing would, at best, give Lithuania’s leaders “a political and diplomatic pressure point” to exploit in their struggle to win acceptance in Moscow and abroad, Cekuolis said.

“Now, maybe, you can give us one-thousandth of the support you are giving Kuwait,” Cekuolis told an American reporter.

Lithuania’s bitter feud with Moscow jumped onto newspaper front pages last month when Soviet paratroopers, backed by tanks, stormed Vilnius’ television tower, killing 13 unarmed civilians. There had been fear that the Soviet military, which is to begin maneuvers in Lithuania today might move to disrupt the plebiscite, but no incidents were reported.

In many locales, turnout was as high or even better than in the 1989 elections for the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies when 86% of those eligible participated.

At Vilnius Polling Station No. 1, set up in the lobby of the Lithuanian Health Ministry, election workers were overwhelmed by the throngs that showed up to vote.

“Today’s participation surpasses anything I have seen in the past,” Albinas Giriunas, a building engineer who serves on the local election commission, said approvingly. “By half past noon, already 60% of the people had come to get their ballots.”

One of the 2,300 registered voters in the downtown district, Elena Urenitete, gave a firm tap on her orange-tinted ballot to push it into the wooden ballot box.

“I voted for independence,” said the diminutive woman well into her 70s. “To live in a free state makes you feel quite different. It’s like a person knowing that he is in charge of his own home.”

Fifteen minutes by car to the northeast in the suburb Naujoji Vilnia, the polling station in the 195th electoral district, set up in the discotheque in the community center, seemed virtually deserted. A woman in a white paper hat waited patiently at the snack bar for customers, but few came.

Lithuanians, Russians, Byelorussians and Poles each make up roughly a quarter of the residents of the district, which has sent an arch foe of Lithuanian independence to the republic’s legislature. Some of those who did come to cast ballots in late afternoon said they had voted against severing ties with Moscow.

“I voted for the union, for our Soviet Union,” Ivan S. Sokolov, 81, a native of the Ukraine, declared.

A retired factory worker, Sokolov first saw Vilnius from a tank when as a soldier in the Red Army’s 28th tank division he helped liberate the Lithuanian capital from the Nazis in the closing months of World War II.

“People here were wearing rags then, they were downcast and hungry and they greeted me and the other soldiers with joy,” the grizzled veteran said. “They seem to forget now how happy they were to see us then.”

Because of the tension in recent weeks and the fear that the Red Army today was intent on storming the Parliament building and seizing the seat of government, Landsbergis had left the building only once in recent weeks--to hear a concert that included a performance of Mozart works.

But late Saturday morning he ventured out on the streets of Vilnius to vote in his home neighborhood.

“I would tell the Lithuanian people to enjoy this day and remember it for the rest of their lives,” he said upon emerging from his limousine. After casting his ballot, he gave his wife, Grazina, a kiss for good luck.