Soviet Union: The Iron Fist

By JAMES WALSH

The general growled his warning over the telephone. As elite Soviet paratroopers were ordered into the Baltic republics early last week, Fyodor Kuzmin, the regional commander, rang up the presidents of secessionist Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia with a stony message. If your people obstruct the mission to round up draft dodgers, he said, the troops will shoot. Four days later, in an atmosphere of mounting confrontation, General Kuzmin kept his word.

Moving to seize Lithuania's self-defense headquarters and main printing plant in Vilnius, armed assault forces opened fire at the plant, known as Press House, shooting into the air and smashing windows. Though most soldiers apparently fired blanks and only one colonel used live ammunition, eight people were reported wounded, one young man shot in the face. As air-raid sirens shrilled across the cobblestone streets of the capital's center, angry young civilians at the publishing center surrounded a tank. "Why are you here?" they screamed at a crew member. "What are you doing?" Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis, charging that troops were "spilling blood," placed an urgent call to Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet President could not come to the phone, Landsbergis was told; he was having lunch.

Fretful foreign governments wondered whether Gorbachev would countenance % bloodshed to suppress the independence movements. A chilling indication came early Sunday morning. Thousands of unarmed Lithuanians, singing freedom songs, tried to prevent Soviet troops and tanks from taking control of a television tower 3 miles outside Vilnius. Shots were fired, and at least 7 people were reported killed and 70 injured. At least two of the dead had been crushed beneath the treads of Soviet tanks.

The confrontation in Vilnius began to recall events in Hungary in 1956, when the Soviet army moved against a restive population under cover of another Middle East flare-up, the Suez crisis. After a week-long show of force in which armored convoys roamed the city and 1,000 paratroopers secured key buildings, Lithuanians started to form makeshift antitank barricades outside the parliament building.

As tensions grew, Gorbachev provided a dark hint of the Kremlin's intentions. In a strong message to Lithuania's rebellious parliament, he said "people" had lost faith in that body's leadership and "demand the introduction of presidential rule" -- in other words, an emergency takeover by Moscow.

In neighboring Latvia, special black beret units from the Interior Ministry mounted a similar show of force two weeks ago, causing fear that presidential rule would soon follow. "This invasion," declared the parliament in Riga, "is only a pretext for starting a large-scale attack on the democratic institutions of Latvia." A contingent of Baltic lawmakers gathered for a regional conference in Finland went even further. Echoing the warning of Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze when he abruptly resigned in protest last month, they charged that Moscow's display of the iron fist signaled "the restoration of the power of dictatorship in the U.S.S.R."

That possibility was what worried much of the world. Officials in Washington and Europe held their breath in the hope that Gorbachev the reformer had not changed his spots. They found little reassuring evidence. Troops mobilized to go not only into the Baltics but also into Georgia, Armenia, Moldavia and the restive western reaches of the Ukraine.

By Saturday a military crackdown in Lithuania seemed well under way: armed units seized two Vilnius police academies and the special-forces division, detaining policemen loyal to the Landsbergis government. "There must be law- and-order everywhere," said a paratroop lieutenant. Thousands of defiant Lithuanians sustained their vigil outside the parliament building, warming ! themselves around bonfires. But Landsbergis, in a press conference, expressed "very modest optimism." Gorbachev's new Federation Council, a supercommittee consisting of leaders of the Soviet republics, unanimously criticized the use of force.

"Gorbachev is using the world's attention on the gulf to get away with this," said Geoffrey Hosking, a Soviet-affairs expert at London University. Agreed British Sovietologist Peter Frank: "Gorbachev is showing his steel teeth as he shifts to the right, which he must do to somehow regain control over the country."

Washington called the troop deployments "provocative and counterproductive,' ' but the move leaves President Bush in a quandary. Despite months of insistent appeals for stronger condemnations of Moscow's behavior in the independence-minded Baltics, Bush has rationalized that it was more important to support Gorbachev. A thorough crackdown could force him to re-evaluate that position.

More immediately, U.S. officials were murmuring about putting off the scheduled Feb. 11-13 Moscow summit with Gorbachev. Their fear was that Bush might have to stay home if the U.S. was at war in the gulf. But the fresh internal strife in the U.S.S.R., combined with reports that Soviet generals have been cheating on last November's Europe-wide treaty for cutbacks in conventional arms, made the summit look even less desirable.

For the record, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater insisted the summit was still on. Until Lithuania's ordeal, at least, Bush's investment in the rendezvous remained as heavy as Gorbachev's. The meeting promised to be an important show of solidarity between the superpowers at a time when U.S. forces might be in full assault on Iraq. For the Kremlin it would illustrate that friendly Soviet relations with the West remain on track, even without icebreaker Shevardnadze. Gennadi Yanayev, the new Soviet Vice President, re- emphasized that Moscow's foreign policy will be "just the same."

But Bush had cause to wonder how solid the Soviet Union's cooperation in the gulf really was. Near the Red Sea, U.S. forces intercepted a Jordan-bound Soviet freighter loaded with military hardware. In a phone call to Bush, Gorbachev affirmed Soviet support for the blockade and the other U.N. resolutions against Iraq, and his lieutenants promised to investigate the shipping incident. Yet Washington also had doubts about whether the Moscow summit would achieve its main purpose: the signing of the first treaty | prescribing actual cuts in U.S. and Soviet long-range nuclear weapons. According to U.S. negotiators, the Soviets have been dragging their heels in agreeing on the details.

That reluctance seemed to square with Western intelligence reports that the Soviet military has been quietly circumventing the new treaty reducing conventional forces in Europe. The outright violations, according to NATO observers, consisted of understating the real level of Soviet forces and reassigning three European-based infantry divisions as "coastal defense" units under command of the navy, which the agreement exempts.

Last week the Communist Youth organ Komsomolskaya Pravda baldly confirmed that the military had shifted thousands of tanks and artillery pieces across the Urals into Soviet Asia to spare them from the destruction required under the pact. Economist V. Litov, an international-affairs specialist, wrote in the conservative daily Sovietskaya Rossiya that the moves were needed to "correct the errors" of Shevardnadze's diplomacy. Litov called on legislators to reject the conventional-arms treaty. But Soviet diplomats were aghast. Said the liberal paper Moscow News: "The situation has given rise to understandable fears in the West about who is in charge."

Presidential spokesman Vitali Ignatenko scoffed at rumors that the security establishment was ruling his boss. His denial seemed borne out by Gorbachev's ultimatum to Lithuania on Thursday. What he called the public "demand" for Moscow to take over in the Baltics actually referred to ethnic Russian demonstrations in Vilnius and Riga orchestrated by Interfront, the anti- independence league of non-Baltic workers in the breakaway republics. Massed outside the parliament building in Vilnius on Tuesday, a wave of these workers broke down the front door before local national guardsmen pushed back the assault with fire hoses. The next day the agitators returned to shout at some 12,000 Lithuanian counterdemonstrators summoned by President Landsbergis to display "our solidarity and determination."

Inside the legislative chamber, however, the republic's leadership was anything but solid. The troop arrivals coincided with the republic's worst internal political crisis since Vilnius declared its independence last March. Prime Minister Kazimiera Prunskiene's government resigned after the parliament voted to rescind hefty food-price increases imposed just a day before. The economic reform drew outraged protests from Lithuania's Russians. Prunskiene, , a moderate widely admired for her ability to cool tensions with Moscow, also came under fire from ardent Lithuanian nationalists who consider her too soft on the Kremlin. The result, as liberals saw it, was a breakdown of authority tailor-made for Moscow to exploit.

A similar facedown was shaping up in Georgia. The ferociously independent Caucasus republic was ordered by Gorbachev to withdraw its police from the autonomous enclave of South Ossetia. While asserting their own right to go it alone, Georgians have clamped down vigorously on Ossetians venturing to break away from Georgia. Lawmakers in Tbilisi called Gorbachev's fiat "interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign republic."

Amid the swirl of gunshots and shouting, Gorbachev did manage to conciliate one important rival: Russian republic leader Boris Yeltsin, who agreed to increase his state's contribution to the central treasury from a tightfisted 23.4 billion rubles ($13 billion) to 80 billion rubles ($45 billion), though still short of its previous 60% share. In return, Yeltsin won concessions on budgetary accounting and greater control over the sprawling republic's enormous coal, natural gas and oil reserves. But Yeltsin withheld any endorsement of the troop deployments, arguing that "violence begets violence."

That view was reflected even more strongly in an Izvestia article by Georgi Arbatov, the noted Americanologist and former Gorbachev adviser. He warned that opponents of perestroika "have tried to exploit natural discontent and worry to turn the clock back. They are trying to blackmail our parliament, politicians and even the President." If so, the principal blackmail victim was proving no mean shakedown artist himself.

With reporting by James Carney/Vilnius and John Kohan/Moscow