Changing Lifestyles : Lithuania Wrestles With Ghost of Fallen KGB : Some fear spy files will be suppressed as former Communists regain power--and perhaps revive the network.

The KGB is gone, officially. The imposing old building on Gediminas Prospekt that housed its thick-walled interrogation cells and listening posts is vacant, planned to become part museum, part government offices.

But the KGB is still here.

“So many people were recruited,” said Balys Gajauskas, chairman of the Lithuanian Parliament’s committee on the Soviet security police. “It penetrated everything, every region of life. Especially positions of power, but also priests, intellectuals, teachers and journalists. They committed a moral crime. The country was occupied, and they collaborated with the occupier.”

So should they be punished? Should their names all be published, as the Czechoslovaks did with their informers? Or should they just be left in peace? And just exactly who was who?

After 18 months of independence, Lithuania is wrestling harder than ever with the secret side of 51 years of Soviet rule, the legacy of a police state that bought or blackmailed tens of thousands of citizens into informing on their neighbors.

Scandals revealing top officials’ purported ties to the KGB have repeatedly rocked Lithuanian politics, focusing public contempt on such luminaries as former Prime Minister Kasimiera Prunskiene and top independence activist Virgilius Cepaitis.

Now with a resurgence of former Communists--capped by former party chief Algirdas Brazauskas’ election as president last month--former political prisoners and others are demanding that the archives inside the KGB headquarters be made public.

They fear that so many of Lithuania’s new leaders will want to suppress their own KGB files that the archives could be sealed for years or left in convenient disarray. And they worry that some Moscow stooges, their cover still intact, could still be up to their old tricks.

During one protest vigil, the former prisoners sat quietly inside a cramped rail wagon hung with signs, including one informing passersby that the KGB had spirited away 110,000 dossiers to Moscow and spied on 300,000 Lithuanians. “Will we let this be repeated?” it asked.

President Brazauskas has announced no plans to seal the archives, which are stuffed haphazardly in sacks in the musty KGB building. But he has made it clear that it would be better for Lithuania to let bygones be bygones.

“I don’t want anyone to take revenge on anyone,” he said in a pre-election speech. “We have to reach agreement. We can settle accounts later, but it’s better just to forget. We’ll definitely settle accounts with those who committed crimes, but only if the court so decides.”

Former political prisoner Romaldas Ragaisis, who was manning the protest wagon one recent afternoon, disagreed. Lithuania must know the truth about its past, he argued. “That’s the only way,” he said. “Isn’t it better and simpler to know? Now it’s all rumors and suspicions. At least you would know which of your neighbors were villains. Now everyone just looks at each other sideways.”

Gintaras Vaicunas, director of the fledgling Museum of the Lithuanian Genocide to be housed in part of the old KGB building, wanted to know the true story about his grandfather, a Lithuanian partisan who fought Soviet rule in the 1940s.

And he found it, sifting through documents until he deciphered the story of how his grandfather walked into a fatal ambush after the man who had fixed his boots sold him out to the Soviets.

The informer was already dead, but it helped just to have the facts.

“They say we have to forget everything, but I say we have to know first,” Vaicunas said. “Why do we have to know? Because all this could happen again.”

Gajauskas’ committee has fought without success to get Parliament to pass a “de-Sovietization law” that would bar KGB collaborators and former high Communist officials from politics for five years. The efforts appear doomed; even Vytautas Landsbergis, Lithuania’s former anti-Communist leader, chose three former Communists as his deputies.

Neighboring Latvia and Estonia are showing similar strains.

Latvian lawmakers have lately even taken the radical step of resolving to disinter about 200 Communists and Soviet war veterans buried in a Riga cemetery. Their official reason for the move: to clear the site to restore monuments to Latvian history there. But Russians perceived it as a slight.

In Estonia, President Lennart Meri found his election campaign last September endangered by allegations that his father had been a Soviet spy.

But of the three former republics, Lithuania appears to be the most determined to root out the traitors from within.

Gajauskas said his committee received 11,000 KGB files on political prisoners and 30,000 wartime files but that it is convinced that all information on the real agentura, or agents’ network, was sent back to Moscow by late 1990. The committee has demanded--to no avail--that those files be returned.

Gajauskas wants no wholesale revenge. Rather, he said, courts should determine who did actual harm and punish them. Many people agreed to cooperate with the KGB, then never handed over any real information or avoided meeting their KGB controls, he allowed.

But real traitors must be brought to trial, Gajauskas said, raising the prospect of a prolonged Nuremberg-type tribunal in this West Virginia-sized nation of 3.7 million.

Meantime, Vilnius itself offers an enlightening look into the innards of one KGB branch.

Although Moscow has offered hard-currency tours of parts of its infamous headquarters on Lubyanka Square, here in Lithuania, museum director Vaicunas provided a peek at what was more clearly the real thing. Past the main entrance of the KGB headquarters, with its massive, ominous doors, he led the way through high-ceilinged halls and down to the basement. There, cell after silent cell once held hapless prisoners awaiting conviction and exile to Siberian labor camps.

Kestutis Banionis, who served seven years in the camps after passing through the Vilnius KGB, paused in one of the cells to describe how he tapped on the walls in Morse code to try to communicate with neighbors. In a padded interrogation cell, he recalled, “they would open the door and say, ‘Will you tell the truth or not?’ Then they’d work on you with their feet or with clubs or with iron, whatever they wanted.”

His worst memories concern a solitary confinement cell, now an innocent-looking room the size of a large closet with a toilet in it. Back then, he said, it always had several inches of freezing water on its floor; prisoners would be locked in for three days with nothing but a half-pound of bread.

Virtually every Lithuanian who received permission to travel abroad in the Soviet years--including Vilius Kavaliauskas, the current Parliament spokesman who worked as a journalist in the United States--falls under suspicion of working for the KGB.

Rita Dapkus, Parliament’s former spokeswoman, contends that the KGB’s incredible penetration is actually a reason not to dredge up all its old games. If you tried to pinpoint everyone sullied by KGB contact, she said, “my argument is that I really believe it would be one-half the population, in some form or another.”

Dapkus herself has already felt the pain of the hunt for informers. It came out last year that she had provided information on emigres to the KGB. Suddenly the American-born Dapkus, who had devoted all her efforts to Lithuanian independence since 1986, was under a pall of suspicion.

She acknowledged that she had agreed to inform for the KGB but said she had contacted FBI and Lithuanian officials, as well, and had been very careful about what information she gave the Soviet network.

“I imagine the KGB left behind that section of documents that will create chaos,” Dapkus mused. “By having this witch hunt going on, it got in its last kick.”