Documentary : Lithuania’s Leader Lives Trapped in His Freedom : Vytautas Landsbergis resides in the Parliament building surrounded by bodyguards. His situation reflects that of the republic he governs.

Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis’ lifestyle is an allegory for politics here. Protected by sandbags and men with revolvers, he lives holed up in his third-floor office, afraid to go into the street for fear he might be shot or abducted.

Yet in his mind, Landsbergis is a free man. As his native land begins its second year of bitter deadlock with the Kremlin, what can be said of Landsbergis also applies to this stubborn, tough-minded slice of disputed territory along the Baltic shore: Moscow and the rest of the world may think differently, but like its president, Lithuania sees itself as free and independent--albeit under the gun.

Last year at about this time, when Lithuania’s Parliament, the Supreme Council, issued a solemn reaffirmation of its sovereignty, it seemed to some a charming but totally impractical act--some sort of 20th-Century rebirth of the imaginary kingdom of Ruritania. But Lithuania’s struggle against Moscow has since taken a deadly serious turn, becoming the stuff of which superpower crises are made.

Lithuania is about the size of West Virginia, and its 3.7 million people give it a population akin to Kentucky’s. But in Kremlin eyes, the republic’s importance is far greater than its size. To Moscow, the front line in the battle to hold the Soviet Union together runs through Independence Square in Vilnius, where barricades were hastily thrown up last month to defend Landsbergis and the rest of the Supreme Council from potential attacks by the Soviet army.

Here is where Soviet geopoliticians, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev included, have taken a stand to prevent an updated version of the “domino theory” from being put to the test. If this Baltic republic is allowed to secede on its own terms, the thinking goes, a meltdown of the Soviet Union will inevitably ensue.

Thus: hold the line in Vilnius and keep Lithuania Soviet, at least for a time, and Gorbachev’s restyled union of “sovereign” republics will have a fighting chance.

On the wind-swept heights west of Vilnius, a 30-foot-long section of steel I-beam, welded into a cross, has been dragged up a steep, icy slope as a stark reminder of the lengths to which pro-Moscow forces in the republic have been willing to go in order to keep it in the Kremlin’s orbit.

It was on this spot that 13 unarmed civilians were slain by Soviet paratroopers last month in the soldiers’ assault on the city’s radio and television tower. In the deep snow, a pathetic shrine to the victims has taken shape--bouquets of flowers quickly frozen by the cold, candles inside jars to shield them from the wind, a wooden statue of Christ wearing a crown of thorns.

Like countless other Lithuanians, Raimondas Milavicius, 51, a railway worker, came recently to look and reflect. “I don’t blame the Russians for the killings; I blame the Bolsheviks,” said the short, squat man who had just finished his shift at the Vilnius rail depot.

More than a month after the assault, armored personnel carriers still stood around the tower. Their motors were running, probably only to keep the crewmen warm, but a sinister reminder that Soviet military might could strike at any time, at any spot. “Beasts,” Milavicius said simply, and spat.

Back in the Parliament building, Landsbergis lives and works, arguably one of the biggest impediments to good relations with Moscow. Probably no single domestic political figure, longtime critic Boris N. Yeltsin included, infuriates Gorbachev as much as this nasal-voiced, pedantic professor from Kaunas who will not let himself be moved by either crippling economic blockades or tanks.

“We had worked together before. And it was not always bad, you know,” Landsbergis, 58, commented when asked about his relations with Gorbachev. He laughed sardonically. “But I have no tanks, you know. . . . I have no paratroopers or machine guns. I do not mean that these are Gorbachev’s final arguments, but they are in his arsenal, they are being used in the negotiations.”

The rest of the Soviet Union is watching Lithuania intently for clues as to how much leeway the Kremlin is willing to give local leaders, just what it is prepared to allow greater “sovereignty” to mean. People here are pessimistic: “Today, US. Tomorrow, YOU,” warns one of the thousands of posters and slogans stuck to the five-foot-high concrete blocks, tangles of reinforcing bars and other defenses piled around the Supreme Council building near the ice-dotted Nerigna River.

The next round in the battle between Moscow and the republics occurs March 3, when Lithuania’s neighbors, Latvia and Estonia, hold their referendums on independence. Gorbachev has called the entire country to the polls on March 17 to vote on his notion of a revitalized federation. Landsbergis and the overwhelming majority of his countrymen want no part of it, but Gorbachev has insisted that they adhere to the cumbersome secession procedure established in 1990, which would delay Lithuanian independence by at least five years.

As midnight approached on a recent Friday, Landsbergis sat on the edge of one of the low-slung couches in his office and pored over the Russian-language text of the latest Lithuanian government protest, motivated by the use of Soviet army helicopters to shower anti-independence tracts over Kaunas the previous day.

“Should this word be voenniye or voinskie ?” Landsbergis mused, pondering two similar Russian words for “military.” It was the music historian and theoretician at his most maddeningly hairsplitting, the stiff-necked intellectual who, when faced with a blistering directive from Gorbachev, has sometimes replied with a critique of the Soviet leader’s prose style and grammar.

By Landsbergis’ count, he has left the Supreme Council building and gone into downtown Vilnius exactly twice since the Soviet army blitz on the broadcasting tower. Once was to vote in Lithuania’s Feb. 9 plebiscite, which reaped an astounding 90.47% vote in favor of independence. The other was when he yielded to his passion for music and slipped out to attend a performance of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” and a Mozart violin concerto.

Even in his office, young men wearing trim blue blazers that conceal pistols warily watch over the safety of Lithuania’s first non-Communist leader in half a century. Leisures are few: One evening Landsbergis played a passage from Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” for guests on the Czechoslovak-made upright piano he had installed in his office. He and his wife, Grazina, spent a few moments in his adjacent living quarters thumbing through a book offered by a visiting Scandinavian delegation. Then husband and wife emerged, shook hands and Landsbergis went back to work.

Does he feel trapped, a captive of the Soviet army? Landsbergis stroked his gray beard in thought, recalling how tens of thousands of his compatriots suffered terribly after the Kremlin’s forcible annexation of Lithuania in 1940, the year the Baltic states lost their independence.

“We still remember how our people lived during the deportations, how they fought as guerrillas for 10 years after the war and lived in bunkers, in the woods. So it is not for me to complain about the luxury that surrounds me here,” he remarked.

There is overt opposition inside Lithuania to the pro-independence forces, but it is difficult to characterize the tack they have taken in the past month as anything else but a Big Lie. Public statements by officials of the 40,000-member Lithuanian Communist Party have become so preposterous, so monstrously false, that they provoke rueful laughter.

During the Feb. 9 referendum, a camera crew from the pro-Moscow channel that now broadcasts from the Soviet army-occupied TV tower toured Vilnius polling places and came back with a report that they were mostly empty. According to Lithuanian government figures endorsed by independent poll watchers from Norway, Denmark, Poland, Belgium and other nations, it was an election in which more than eight out of every 10 Lithuanians took part.

The clumsy editing of the TV videotape, intended to give the impression that almost no one had voted, was obvious.

“These people are capable of anything,” commented barrel-chested Algirdas Brazauskas, who, as former first secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party, knows much about his former comrades. “They really now are a military party, since more than half of their members are now Soviet army officers,” he said

“There are very few Communists left who are Lithuanians, and local party organizations around the republic are dying on the vine. Their prospects for the future are poor,” said Brazauskas, who last year led the transformation of a larger, pro-secession faction of Lithuanian Communists into the Democratic Party of Labor.

As the hard-line pro-Moscow Communists have all but openly declared war on the Landsbergis government, their front man, the pugnacious Juozas Jermalavicius, 50, has become the chief of the party ideology department. In a loud and steady voice, the ethnic Lithuanian with close-cropped hair and a ready grin pours forth a series of improbabilities in public that make even his Leningrad-born deputy smile in embarrassment. He accuses the Landsbergis government of lacking public support, of being “pro-fascist,” of “persecuting” its enemies.

“An economic catastrophe is brewing in Lithuania. Its results will be horrendous, and not only in industry. Lithuania could end up without bread,” Jermalavicius said in an interview held at party headquarters, a downtown building guarded by Soviet soldiers that was seized from Brazauskas’ faction on grounds that is was built with money sent from Moscow.

Criminal charges of trying to overthrow Lithuania’s government by violence have been lodged against Jermalavicius, who last month claimed to have met with members of the shadowy “National Salvation Committee,” which supposedly requested the storming of the broadcasting facilities. Brazauskas says the committee is nothing but a fiction covering Communist and military involvement in a failed bid at toppling Landsbergis.

Despite the tug-of-war between Moscow and Vilnius, life goes on. In Vilnius the buses run, cafes are jammed, record stores offer a Soviet pressing of the Platters’ greatest hits. Communists may warn darkly of looming disaster, but shops here usually seem better supplied than in Moscow. True, a good pair of women’s leather boots in a state-run store costs 160 rubles, or about three weeks’ salary for a typical urban worker, but that’s no different than elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

Moscow, which shut off oil and gas shipments to Lithuania for a time last year, continues to throttle the local economy, officials here say. But it is hard to tell whether those measures are intentional or fallout from the general breakup of the Soviet economy. Whatever the reason, Soviet factories are shipping two-thirds less steel and timber to Lithuania this year, Supreme Council spokesman Audrius Azubalis said.

Following the overwhelming mandate in favor of secession expressed at the polls, the consensus among political leaders in Vilnius now seems to be: Enough declarations. The time has arrived to work so that people live better, so that they have a personal interest in independence. “Politically speaking, we have already accumulated a great deal of capital in the world arena,” Brazauskas said. “Now we need to guarantee the normal functioning of the economy.”

Asked what comes next, Landsbergis listed measures that were largely economic: the selling of state-owned holdings to private investors, the drafting of a purely Lithuanian state budget with no input or payments from Moscow, land reform and the reorganization of Soviet-style collective farms into modern cooperatives.

Any of those bold and largely anti-socialist steps, by itself, would be enough to kindle a new quarrel with Gorbachev over the extent of Lithuania’s rights and its responsibilities to the rest of the country.

It is still far from clear who ordered the assault on the broadcasting tower, but the masterminds clearly did Lithuanian nationalists a service. After less than a year in office, the leadership had been riven by feuds, and the popular and pragmatic premier, economist Kazimiera Prunskiene, had quit only a few days earlier, citing longstanding differences with Landsbergis on how to deal with Moscow and reshape the economy.

The resurgence of an external enemy, armed with T-72 tanks and visibly bent on destroying their government, unified Lithuanians like nothing before. It once was possible for Brazauskas and others to be Communists and still be held in esteem by many here. But Lithuanians who now take a pro-Moscow stance are branded “Judases” in the pro-secession press or, like Jermalavicius, are dismissed as ambitious idiots.

“Usually, when an occupational army is present in a given country, there is a kind of quisling administration. But here the situation is quite different. We are independent,” Landsbergis said.

On March 11, it will be exactly one year since the day when Landsbergis and the other Supreme Council members voted for the restoration of Lithuania’s independence, then joined hands and chanted the name of their homeland in their native tongue: “Lietuva! Lietuva!”

As another year begins, people here now realize more than ever that the road will be long and perhaps marred by additional acts of violence. That only seems to make them more obstinate.

One day last month, as Soviet troops ringed the Press House, the nerve center of the republic’s newspaper industry, a group of unarmed Lithuanians positioned themselves between the soldiers and the building. Visibly frightened, the people nevertheless began to sing, first with strained and nervous voices, then at full volume.

It was an old folk tune, people at the scene explained, including one verse which promises: “We will meet you in paradise, and we will be your friends.”

The showdown outside the Press House recalled the words of Jonas Maciulis Maironis, the bard of Lithuania’s turn-of-the-century national revival, who, reflecting on his homeland’s history, wrote: “Even in the worst of times, we sang with inextinguishable hope.”