BREAKING THE UNION

Stephen Handelman reports from Lithuania on the rush to independence

Vilnius JUOZAS Kuolialis's mother once hoped he would become a priest. She would be pleased to see him now. The amiable, 59-year-old communist apparatchik has be- come one of the last keepers of the faith in Lithuania. 'Eventually,' he says with an air of priestly conviction, 'Lithuanians will realise that they need us.'

This, as any of his neighbours could tell him, is not particularly likely. With the opening of the new decade, the tiny Baltic republic has joined the march of democra- cy across Eastern Europe with its own special contribution to the demise of Marxist-Leninist holy writ. Lithuania has not only broken the party rules as pre- scribed by Moscow, it appears to be getting away with it.

The significance of events over the past weeks in Lithuania cannot be over- estimated. Appropriately, the revolution started a few shopping days before Christ- mas, which Catholic Lithuania was allowed to celebrate legally for the first time in 40 years. In December, the republic became the first in the Soviet empire to legalise a multi-party system, and then rubbed the Point in by severing the links between its Own Communist Party and Moscow. Heed- less of the gasps and splutterings of an overwrought Kremlin, the local communist apparatus turned from being an instrument of Moscow's control over the republic to become, in the words of Bronius Genzelis, one of its new Politburo members, an agent of the struggle for 'national libera- tion'.

It all happened so quickly that even the Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, was caught with his rhetoric down. He cancel- led meetings with foreign visitors this month to cope with the political fall-out. At the time of writing, he was on his way to Vilnius to take the full measure of the Lithuanian heresy, and to reassure his increasingly doubtful hard-liners at home that he remains in control of events.

Mr Gorbachev did make noble, albeit questionable, efforts to head off the disas- ter. Soon after the republic's communists Voted to split from Moscow, the Soviet leader told a group of Lithuanians in Moscow, 'You won't survive.' When he was asked whether that was a threat or a prediction, he hastily replied it was the latter. But he had no hesitation about telling the Lithuanian Party leader, Algir- das Brauzaskas, in a telephone conversa- tion last month, 'I have the means to remove you.' Mr Gorbachev's succession of warnings, repeated afterwards in private by shaken officials, were one reason why, for several days around Christmas, Lithua- nians waited with a degree of dread for the sound of tanks on their streets.

Whether the Soviet leader was serious, or merely trying to prove a point to his Politburo hard-liners, no one will know. According to one story making the rounds in Vilgius, Mr Gorbachev finally con- fronted his angry Central Committee mem- bers with the words, 'Some of you are bloodthirsty, but I will not have blood on my hands.' A few days later, at any rate, he listened dispassionately as Brauzaskas spelled out a plan for Lithuania's eventual political sovereignty during a hastily called meeting in the Kremlin.

Soon after Lithuanian communists voted to split from Moscow, Mr Kuolialis and a small band of Moscow loyalists formed themselves into a faction they called the 'Provisional Lithuanian Communist Party'. Lithuanians, with characteristic black humour, have already given them the double-entendre name of 'Party of the Night' — signifying both the evening meet- ing at which their group was formed and the fact that many of their leading mem- bers were known to be associated with past abuses of the most nightmarish and Stalin- ist variety.

The 'Provisionals' hope they will be recognised by the Kremlin as the sole keepers of the flame? but it is a dream increasingly unlikely to be realised. Whether Moscow likes it or not, Lithuania has become the first Soviet point of entry for the virus that whipped through Eastern Europe last autumn and winter. The three million people living here are fully aware of what they have accomplished, and are eager to boast about it. 'We are talking about something totally unprecedented in the history of the Soviet Union,' says

Genzelis, a Vilnius university philosophy professor who has suddenly found himself in the front ranks of Lithuania's new leadership. 'Moscow's acceptance of the existence of an independent Lithuanian Communist Party amounts to a major step towards independence. The party is only a symbol of the process.'

Just over a year ago, only independence groups on the fringes felt comfortable with such rhetoric. Leading intellectuals, both inside and outside the Party, dismissed pronouncements of Lithuania's imminent release from Soviet control as dangerous and politically immature. In the autumn of 1988, Lithuania joined its sister Baltic republics of Latvia and Estonia in the formation of a grassroots popular move- ment. Called Sajudis, it promised to act as a moral force in the renewal of Lithuanian society and abjured involvement in parti- san politics. It proved instrumental in leading Lithuania out of the apathy and pessimism of the post-war years.

Now the Party itself has appeared to outstrip Sajudis. A banner hanging in the square outside the Vilnius Central Com- mittee makes the point succinctly. It reads 'Lithuania without sovereignty is a Lithuania without a future.' Local com- munist officials speak of achieving inde- pendence within 'one or two years'. Yet few Lithuanians believe the republic can painlessly give up the access to cheap resources and raw materials available through its incorporation into .the Soviet Union, and cynics point out that what Moscow doesn't want to achieve with tanks can be just as effectively achieved by economic blockade.

But it now seems possible that some version of economic association linked to statehood can be put on the negotiating table with Moscow. Vladimir Korniyenko, an ethnic Russian member of the new Central Committee and an ardent advocate of Lithuanian sovereignty, believes the Kremlin will soon come to the realisation

that an independent Lithuania can help move the stalemated process of peres- troika.

While there are many in the republic who argue that an independent Lithuanian Communist Party is a contradiction in terms, the Party is now almost universally regarded as the institution most capable of managing the transition. The test will come next month when the dizzying variety of communists, including the members of the Party of the Night, compete at the polls with newly legalised parties such as the Social Democrats for seats in republic-wide elections. Juozas Kuolialis, for his part, is willing to make a prediction about the Provisionals' chances. 'We will probably lose,' he said. But, evidently strengthened by the prospect of martyrdom, he did not seem unduly disturbed.

Stephen Handelman is Moscow bureau chief of the Toronto Star.