Don’t Fight Eventual Baltic Succession

Heard this one before? A spokesman for the Soviet Interior Ministry commando unit that briefly occupied Lithuania’s telecommunications center on Wednesday said the raid was prompted by anonymous messages it had received “about an illegal storing of weapons and ammunition.” How would the forces of repression in the Soviet Union manage without such convenient advisories? The army’s crackdown in Vilnius last January was justified by Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov as a response to appeals from a largely faceless group calling itself the National Salvation Committee, which said it feared the emergence of a “bourgeois dictatorship.” Putting down that alleged threat killed 14 Lithuanians and injured scores. This week’s raid fortunately seems to have been free of casualties. It has, though, left some deeply troubling questions unanswered.

The first is, what was its point? Lithuanian Vice President Ceslovas Stankevicius thinks he knows. It was, he says, a rehearsal for the possible overthrow of Lithuania’s democratic government somewhere down the line. Maybe; certainly severing Lithuania’s links to the outside world by seizing its telephone, radio and television facilities would be an obvious first step in a coup. The rehearsal theory has a solid ring to it.

But it may well be that the raid by the Black Beret commandos--the name ominously recalls the right-wing thugs of Russia’s Black Hundred earlier in this century--had a much bigger political purpose. That purpose could have been to embarrass Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev just a few weeks before he is due to meet leaders of the industrialized nations in London to appeal for a massive infusion of aid. For Gorbachev’s domestic enemies know, as he does, that the price of Western economic aid is sure to be an insistence on speedier and more sweeping reforms. Soviet anti-reformists, many of whom would lose their jobs, their status and their ideological anchors once the new economic and political era truly dawns, have a huge stake in resisting change. What better way to sabotage the chances than by making Gorbachev, on the eve of his London journey, look like a typically heavy-handed Soviet dictator?

Gorbachev denies having approved this week’s action in Vilnius. So too, far less plausibly, does Boris Pugo, the anti-reformist head of the Interior Ministry. To hear Pugo tell it, the whole thing was a matter of local initiative. But that’s not the way things happen, even in a changing Soviet Union. Who was responsible for the raid? The answer may well lie in another question, familiar in the case of almost every crime: Who stands to benefit most from it?

The United States and its allies in any event are going to have some tough questions to put to Gorbachev when he reaches London. The Baltic states--Lithuania, along with Estonia and Lativia--remain a special concern of the West. Their independence, snatched from them 50 years ago, awaits restoration at an appropriate but early time. Did Gorbachev in fact know nothing about the Vilnius raid? If so, just what does he, his nation’s chief executive and commander of its armed forces, plan to do to discipline those responsible?