Ex-Lithuania Leader Called KGB Informer : Baltics: Former prime minister dismisses charges as political maneuvering in advance of elections.

Lithuania’s Supreme Court ruled Monday that former Prime Minister Kazimiera Prunskiene, one of the leaders in the Baltic republic’s battle to break away from the Soviet Union, had been a collaborator with the KGB.

The court said that Prunskiene, now a deputy in Lithuania’s Parliament, passed information to Soviet state security about German researchers and also reported on Polish students and Lithuanian emigrants, Russian Television reported.

The nightly news said Prunskiene had signed a document admitting she cooperated with the defunct Soviet agency in 1984-85, before mass movements in favor of independence arose in her country.

Prunskiene has steadfastly denied working for the KGB and denounced the case as nothing more than an attempt to blacken her reputation at home and abroad. On Monday, she angrily dismissed the court’s verdict as political, aimed at discrediting the opposition with which she is associated before parliamentary elections scheduled for Oct. 25.

“I see this as the final phase of a campaign against me launched a year ago, when they tried to implicate me in some criminal acts while I was prime minister,” she said in an interview in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, with the British news agency Reuters.

Prunskiene said the only real evidence submitted were routine reports she wrote after foreign academic trips, universal practice under Soviet rule.

“If such a thing can be called cooperation with the KGB, then all of us can be accused of cooperation with the Soviet system,” she told Reuters.

Prunskiene is the fourth Lithuanian legislator to be proclaimed a KGB collaborator. Revelations late last year that supposedly pro-independence politicians had cooperated with the KGB stunned this nation of 3.7 million, which declared independence from the Soviet Union in March, 1990. Prunskiene, a member of the Sajudis grass-roots nationalist movement, was named prime minister the same month that Lithuania proclaimed an end to half a century of Soviet rule.

One of the most radical and influential Parliament members, Virgilius Cepaitis, was convicted in March of working as a KGB agent. That month, the Supreme Court opened its investigation of Prunskiene.

Saying she had been known to the KGB as “Agent Shatri,” the court ruled Monday after a five-month investigation that Prunskiene had engaged in “conscious cooperation.”

The charges, read before a packed courtroom, gave no additional specifics. Prunskiene, an economist by training, did not attend the session.

Prunskiene had a falling-out with President Vytautas Z. Landsbergis and resigned as prime minister in January, 1991, after thousands of angry workers protested her plan to raise food prices without compensating low-income people. Yet she has continued to serve in the 141-member Supreme Council, or Parliament.

While in office, she was viewed as much more conciliatory toward Moscow than was Landsbergis, and she was on friendly terms with then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

If the Supreme Council ratifies the court decision, Prunskiene will be stripped of her deputy’s mandate. In Vilnius, that is considered likely to happen. Parliament is scheduled to be dissolved next month anyway, before the elections, and Prunskiene said two months ago she did not plan to run again. But she remains a major figure in the moderate opposition to Landsbergis and his ultranationalist allies.

“Prunskiene used to have big ambitions, but this is it for her career,” television commentator Cheslovas Ishkausks said. “She’s dirtied herself.”

Some residents of the small Baltic nation said they are growing weary of the hunt for prominent figures who had done Moscow’s bidding.

“If we’re going to keep looking for everyone who worked at one point for the KGB, then we won’t have time to build a new future for ourselves,” said Dalia Kutraite, 40, a television journalist. “I fear these eternal searches for enemies because they take so much time and attention away from more important tasks.”