Next Step : Baltics Find Freedom Isn’t Easy : * Newfound liberty has stirred feverish nationalism. Is it running roughshod over minorities?

Independence for this country was scarcely a week old when the Lithuanians first tasted the bitter pill of pluralistic democracy.

The subject was the country’s sizable Polish population, which under Soviet rule had functioned as an autonomous community that elected its own local government councils.

But the government of Vytautas Landsbergis thought that arrangement woefully lax. As one of his first acts after independence, the president dismissed the Polish representatives and replaced them with handpicked Lithuanian administrators.

Within a day there appeared one of the classic manifestations of representative government: a public demonstration.

In front of the blocky, modernistic Parliament building--where weeks before the Lithuanians had piled sandbags and erected concrete barricades to stave off a threatened Soviet assault--a Polish crowd armed with placards and banners bewailed their new status as second-class citizens.

Lithuanian television cameras rolled as the demonstrators taunted Parliament deputies on their way to work. Uneasy Lithuanian police guarded the doors. In Warsaw, the Polish government rumbled sourly about the treatment of its brethren. Landsbergis held his ground.

In a second-floor apartment jammed with scholarly books in Lithuanian, Russian, English, Latin and Greek, Arvidas Juozaidis reflected on the naive assumption, popular in the outside world, that the fall of communism would usher in a radiant Jeffersonian era amid the wreckage of the Soviet empire.

“I always knew that democracy would not be easy to establish here,” he said.

Juozaidis was experienced enough in Baltic politics to see the problems looming far ahead. A popular essayist who had helped create Sajudis, the pro-independence organization that now dominates Lithuanian politics, he resigned from the group to protest its drift toward enforced political orthodoxy.

But sensations of doubt like his are common across the Baltic region, where Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are just beginning to work their way through a difficult morning after.

Indeed, in the weeks after the Kremlin’s formal recognition of the three new governments on Sept. 6, the rest of the world seemed more jubilant about the Baltics’ victory than the Balts themselves did. For nobody is more aware than they that the failure of authoritarianism does not mean its inevitable replacement by liberal democracy--or that the flight of Communists does not mean the vacuum will be filled by capitalists.

A recent monthlong tour of the newly independent region showed how deeply people feel the burden of problems that they have not had to confront for 50 years.

Airing out national closets shuttered for half a century of totalitarian Soviet rule, they are finding them filled with rattling skeletons, such as the record of collaboration between Lithuanian nationalists and Nazi killers during World War II.

Issues of social structure and group rights have to be solved by leaders basking in ethnic and nationalist victory who may not act in ways that Europeans and Americans find acceptable or even comprehensible.

Perhaps the hardest such issue is that of Baltic “minorities.”

The term is generally a code for the Russians imported by the hundreds of thousands during the Soviet years to labor in Baltic factories. But it also refers to Lithuania’s Poles, and even the Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians living within one another’s borders.

After decades of fearing that the Soviets were determined to dilute or even destroy their very cultures, Baltic leaders see their responsibility in nation-building as less the creation of paragons of pluralistic democracy than the restoration of ethnic homelands.

So they debate citizenship rules that exclude those who don’t speak the Baltic languages or who arrived after 1940, the date of the Soviet takeover. Estonia has even begun a program to pay off Russians if they relinquish their residence permits and apartments and move back across the border.

“Definitely, it would relieve some of the Estonians’ existential fears for their culture if some of the Russians would leave,” observed Andres Kollist, director of Estonia’s Department of Immigration.

“Most of these immigrants came in after World War II in a process organized by the Soviet government as the most important part of their colonization policy. On the other hand, on a personal level these are normal people and they have rights here.”

The citizenship issue is just one reason that throughout the Baltics people are more weighed down with the burdens of independence than enthralled with its possibilities. Many recognize how much needs to be done to establish democratic institutions and jump-start their moribund economies.

“There’s no chance for our generation,” said Irene Dziuziate, who teaches English at Vilnius University. “Perhaps things will be better for my children.”

Dziuziate was hardly speaking as an elder looking back on a misspent life: She is 31, with two children and a husband who works as a trade union officer. But her remark was typical of people of her generation, whose formative years were spent under the Soviet system and who now feel ill equipped to mine the potential of freedom.

“It’s an interesting job, re-creating a state without any experience,” Jiri Luik, head of the political department of the Estonian Foreign Ministry, remarked wryly. “The most frustrating thing is that we’ve lived for 50 years under military occupation. We’re not prepared to have a normal life. We’re prepared to have a fight.”

It is true that some common concerns in the Baltics could be dismissed as reflexive paranoia.

Take the issue of the Soviet menace. Most outsiders regard the prospect of a Soviet reassertion of power in the region as nothing short of fantastic. But the Balts will feel insecure as long as hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops remain stationed on their soil, subject to forthcoming negotiations over a timetable for withdrawal. Many people here talk as if their newly gained freedom could be revoked by a sudden deployment of Soviet troops.

“I know in my head it’s an irrational fear,” one educated Estonian said weeks after the failed coup threw Soviet politics into disarray. “But not in my heart. If you’ve lived all your life under this threat, it’s hard to forget about it overnight.”

In any event, not all the Balts’ concerns are unrealistic. Most citizens rightly expect the coming winter to be a very difficult one. Food and heating oil could become dangerously scarce. An embargo of gasoline by the Soviets has lately reduced supplies in Lithuania to a few days’ reserves.

Soviet-built factories shorn of planning and market support from Moscow could shut down, placing the responsibility for the welfare of tens of thousands of Russian migrant workers on the shoulders of the penniless new governments in Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn.

On top of that, many people are disillusioned by what they see as not much more than a symbolic commitment to economic assistance from the West.

“Too many people here thought it would be enough to declare independence and the West would welcome us with joy,” said Jonas Tamulis, a young liberal in the Lithuanian Parliament.

Economic and technical help is crucial here because the Soviet system provided so little in the way of useful models.

“In the Soviet Union there was no economy and no finance and no specialists,” said Eduardas Vilkas, an economist and leader of a parliamentary faction. “So the chairman of the board of our Lithuanian state bank is, I would say, incompetent, and the entire system is very weak.”

Vilkas has long wearied of the delegations of Western “experts” who have trooped into his country, nodded sagely at its problems and trooped out again, leaving written studies behind but no concrete help.

“Western help so far has been mostly episodic,” he complained from his office overlooking Vilnius’ Neris River. “It’s teams or individuals who want to write articles for their academic journals.

“The best thing would be to have a Western bank come in and establish a branch here. Then our bankers could see how to do things themselves.”

It’s not only in economics that Western models must be imported. Thoughtful leaders in these three countries know that the task of replacing an authoritarian regime with genuine democratic institutions is by no means assured of success. The best example of this is Lithuania, where politics is heavily infected by ideology and pressure to conform to a new and strident nationalism is strong.

It is in Lithuania where the dominant political organization has taken the most heavy-handed steps to establish itself as the state and where real debate about policy is at its least vigorous.

Socialist-minded leaders still control important factions in the Parliament, where they might conceivably respond to the likely economic stress of the coming months with such socialist answers as price and wage controls and market restrictions. The opposition is so weak that many politicians think Lithuania’s only salvation is the application of Western pressure to keep its leadership on the path to liberalization.

“If we’re left here alone to solve our own problems,” remarked Tamulis, a Parliament deputy, “it’s possible the democratic system will not last long here, or it will lay just on the surface.

“Independence doesn’t mean the people are free--those two things are different. Some people here think that democracy could come in two steps: creating the state first and then creating the democracy. But I see the process of liberalization already slowing down.”

“It was a mistake to crack down on the Polish councils, for example,” said Juozaidis, the Lithuanian writer. “A strong opposition would help avoid these kinds of mistakes. But our politicians are very nervous about even being called the opposition.”

Baltics’ Freedom Fight Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have had a lengthy struggle to cast off domination by Germans, Russians and others. Highlights of the fight since World War I: * The three provinces of imperial Russia gained independence in 1918, but it was short-lived. * Vilnius, Lithuania, was occupied by Poland from 1920 to 1939. * A secret Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939 allowed the Soviet Union to annex the Baltic territories in 1940. * The Germans occupied the territories in 1941 and stayed until 1944. * After World War II, the Soviet Union took control of the republics, a move never recognized by the United States. * The Helsinki Accords established in 1975 set down the principle of respect for established borders and put a damper on the republics’ quest for independence. * In March, 1990, Lithuania declared its sovereignty and announced that it would secede from the Soviet Union. After a clampdown by Moscow, Lithuania delayed its declaration. Nonetheless, Estonian and Latvian independence vows quickly followed. * The three republics again proclaimed their independence in August, 1991, after the failed coup to oust Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. * On Sept. 6, Moscow formally recognized their sovereignty.

Sources: Los Angeles Times, Times Wire Services

Who lives in the Baltics

LITHUANIA

Population: 3.7 million

Lithuanian: 80%, Russian: 9%, Polish: 8%, Belarussian: 2%, Other: 1%

LATVIA

Population: 2.7 million

Lett (ethnic Latvian): 52%, Russian: 34%, Belarussian: 5%, Polish: 3%, Ukrainian: 4%, Other: 2%

ESTONIA

Population: 1.6 million

Estonian: 62%, Russian: 30%, Ukrainian: 3%, Belarussian: 2%, Finnish: 1%, Other: 2%