Kremlin Acts to Guarantee Referendum : Soviet Union: Officials void actions by some republics that could have barred voter participation in the March 17 election on a ‘renewed federation.’

The Soviet legislature, trying to brake burgeoning separatist movements throughout the country, on Monday voided actions by some republics that it said would have barred voter participation in the March 17 referendum on a new federal structure.

In an additional measure designed to overrule plebiscites on independence scheduled for next Sunday in Latvia and Estonia, the Supreme Soviet said such votes could not replace participation in the nationwide referendum sought by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Gorbachev, struggling to keep his multiethnic country together as he prepares to start his seventh year as Soviet leader, wants the nationwide vote to prove the extent of support for a “renewed federation of equal and sovereign republics.”

But Vladimir P. Orlov, chairman of the central government commission created to supervise the referendum, told the Supreme Soviet that seven republics--Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia--have refused to take part or not yet agreed to open the polls.

To short-circuit the nationalist, often pro-secession leaderships of those republics, the national legislature empowered local government councils, factories, labor unions and units of the Soviet army and navy to set up their own polling stations and election commissions, and to conduct the March 17 vote themselves.

Such steps will allow Russians and other ethnic minorities in the recalcitrant republics--groups that are typically in favor of maintaining ties with Moscow--to vote. It is doubtful, however, that local leaders will regard such partial elections as legitimate.

Gorbachev has already invalidated the results of the only referendum on local independence, held Feb. 9 in Lithuania. In that vote, more than 90% of 2.65 million voters cast ballots for the restoration of Lithuania’s independence.

Voting by absentee ballot has already begun in Lithuania’s Baltic neighbors of Estonia and Latvia, both of which have called for Sunday’s plebiscite to prove the extent of grass-roots support for the pro-secession tack taken by local leaders.

As a half-measure designed to avoid offending the Kremlin, Latvia’s parliament agreed to permit the March 17 referendum, but refused to do anything to organize it. The Supreme Soviet, however, insisted officials in the republics “immediately take measures to set up commissions for the country-wide referendum and remove all obstacles preventing citizens from exercising their right to participate.”

The local plebiscites, the Supreme Soviet said, “are not a legal ground for the non-holding of the union-wide referendum because they have not provided an answer to the main question”--namely the issue Gorbachev wants placed on the ballot.

Locked in a political quarrel with Gorbachev, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin has exploited the opportunity offered by the national referendum to put an additional question to Russian voters: whether Russia’s leader should be chosen by direct popular vote. If they approve, and Yeltsin is subsequently elected, it would give him a mighty source of popular legitimacy to press his demands on Gorbachev.

Also Monday, renewed proof of the exacerbated state of Soviet ethnic relations was reported from the region of South Ossetia in the Transcaucasian republic of Georgia, where six people were reported slain as local separatists and Georgian nationalists waged a bloody feud over the region’s political status.

The Georgian village of Avnevi was shelled with rockets on Sunday and sprayed with machine-gun fire, and four people were killed and eight wounded, the Soviet Interior Ministry said. Two more people were reported shot to death in an automobile.

Long-standing ethnic grievances and a dispute over local rights are at the heart of the conflict. Georgia’s nationalist leadership has abolished the autonomous status of South Ossetia, while the Ossetians insist they should have no fewer rights than Georgia and should be able to establish direct ties with the Moscow-based central government.

In the Soviet legislature, Chairman Anatoly I. Lukyanov said the Georgian leadership was required by law to declare a state of emergency throughout South Ossetia, in keeping with an order to that effect passed last Wednesday by the Supreme Soviet.

“If (Tuesday’s) session of the Georgian parliament fails to take the decision, the Soviet president is entitled to impose a state of emergency by himself,” Lukyanov added, setting the stage for a possible showdown between Gorbachev and the pro-independence Georgian leadership, led by President Zviad Gamsakhurdia.

In other developments, Gorbachev asked the Supreme Soviet to approve 23 members of Prime Minister Valentin S. Pavlov’s new Cabinet of Ministers, or government, including such conservative and hard-line Communist stalwarts as Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov, KGB Chairman Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, and many other incumbents.

The candidacies are to be debated on the floor of the Supreme Soviet on Thursday. If Gorbachev gets his way, Pavlov, the former finance minister who replaced Nikolai I. Ryzhkov as Soviet prime minister, is to be succeeded in his old job by his former assistant, First Deputy Finance Minister Vladimir Orlov.