Confronting the Russian bear: the Soviet response to stirrings of freedom in the Baltic nations is theater of the absurd, but we're not laughing.

The Soviet response to stiffings of freedom in the Baltic nations is theater of the absurd, but we're not laughing.

WHY DO superpowers seem to pick on madhouses? In the U.S. invasion of Grenada, one was accidentally bombed, turning those inmates who were not injured by the bombing loose to enjoy the brief war through the various prisms of their insanity.

Soon after Lithuania had proclaimed its independence, elite Soviet paratroopers deliberately raided a Kaunas mental hospital and dragged off several patients in the mistaken belief that they were deserters from the Soviet army. It was the deluded roughing up the delusional.

The latest news from Vilnius gives more cause for trepidation than for morbid amusement. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) has banned the publication of pro-independence periodicals at the Vilnius Press Center, a complex that includes many editorial offices and one of the few printing plants in Lithuania capable of publishing daily newspapers nationwide (Lithuania is about the size of South Carolina). Coming on top of the occupation of this building by Soviet internal-security troops, the banning is the latest event in a process that could be called creeping martial law.

"It means effectively, if not officially, the banning of a free press in Lithuania," said Aidis Palubenis, a Lithuanian-American volunteer in the press room of Lithuania's parliament, the Supreme Council. He explained that a pro-Moscow Lithuanian Communist, reading orders from the Soviet Council of Ministers, had announced that the only paper that could officially be printed was Sovietskaya Litva (Soviet Lithuania).

A Russian-language publication that once bore that name was recently transformed by its staff into a pro-independence paper for local Russians called Echoes of Lithuania. As this is being written, it was assumed that the Russian editors of this publication would not cooperate with Moscow, nor would any of the other Press Center workers, despite the presence of a squad of KGB troops in the building. Pro-Moscow forces, apparently helped by KGB disinformation specialists, had a few days earlier printed a paper claiming to be Sovietskaya Litva somewhere in neighboring Byeloirussia, and attempted to pass it off as the real thing, to the bitter amusement of readers in Lithuania.

The absurd and the tragicomic, it seems, are what we must expect from Mikhail Gorbachev's increasingly desperate attempts to hold together the crumbling Russian empire. Lithuania, the biggest of the three Baltic mice, is walking point," as soldiers say. The little trio have no intention of staying in the bear's lair, but they still have to bluff their way past an angry, blustering bear on the way out.

In another Lithuanian hospital, the Russian assault was on target, and 12 Lithuanian youths were captured and beaten bloody. Here, the cruelty was not diluted by absurdity. The TV images were of doors smashed and beds overturned in a rage that suggests the paratroopers were doing more than just a police job.

According to Soviet authorities, who denied that the beatings took place, the deserters were simply returned to their units. This can be worse than formal punishment. These regular units, across the varenplasa dzimtene (the big and mighty motherland, as Latvians sarcastically call the USSR), ship several young men per month back to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in coffins. Causes of death vary-suicide, some peculiar accident, trauma consistent with physical abuse, heart failure, whatever. Only one thing is invariable: the risk of death and injury in the Soviet army is higher for Balts, who face growing ethnic hatred from Russians, than for the average recruit.

This is not to say that the average Soviet soldier has it easy-degradation and abuse are a way of life, and this has little in common with the kind of shock-treatment tempering of young men experienced in the U.S. Marines or other elite military units. The army is simply Soviet society with the color, contrast, and volume knobs turned all the way up. And young men of all ethnic backgrounds are, as one Latvian journalist put it, "saying, To hell with it."

"Nobody even hides any more," he explains. You hitch home or take a bus in full field uniform, a clear sign that you have up and left. You just head home and say, Screw the army. And that kind of thing spreading like wildfire, with the Baltics in the lead, is what really scares Moscow."

The potential for disintegration of the Soviet army probably worries Gorbachev more than anything else about the Baltic republics. Just recently, Latvia's Popular Front urged young Latvian men to simply refuse even to sign for their draft notices, which come by a kind of registered mail. Untouched, the paper has no legally binding effect, and draft dodgers, at this stage, can only be brought before local courts and prosecutors. As a practical matter, this means few will be punished. Latvia's Popular Front now controls the republic's Supreme Soviet; it still states that it will form a new government and restore independence, possibly as soon as May 3.

Estonia's newly elected Supreme Soviet followed Lithuania by a couple of weeks, declaring, in less clear terms but with the same clarity of intent, that it considered its own current regime illegal and that it was starting to restore an independent Republic of Estonia.

Unlike the Lithuanians, whose parliament now says it is up to individual young men to decide whether to serve or not, with no guarantees for the safety of draft resisters or "refugees" from the Soviet army, deserters in Latvia generally go underground, living in safe houses run by a women's anti-military movement or simply hiding in the forest or countryside. Unlike draft resisters, deserters face Soviet military justice, and there are few illusions that the legal system of a crumbling totalitarian empire will protect anyone.

Mirage of Legality

SPEAKING on a crackly line from Vilnius, William Hough, an international lawyer from New York who is the Lithuanian government's pro bono legal advisor, reels off treaty after charter after convention after principle of civilized international behavior that the Soviet Union violated with its curt, brutal actions against the men hiding in the Lithuanian hospitals. There is controlled outrage in Hough's voice, and disbelief that principles he has studied in law school and applied in New York and U.S. courts seem to be irrelevant in Lithuania, mere mirages through which are seen the reality of Kalashnikov bayonets, leather boots, and brutal paratrooper faces.

As most of the foreign correspondents in Lithuania were given offers to leave that they could not refuse-the Soviets could close their Moscow bureaus-the international flow of news was increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small group of young Lithuanian-Americans and Lithuanian-Canadians who happened to be studying in their parents' or grandparents' homeland at the time of the momentous events. The students, who are staying almost round-the-clock in the Lithuanian parliament's press room, function as volunteer press spokesmen.

Many say a free Lithuania will become their adopted motherland. They weren't born or raised there, but through their families and the exile network, they never really left Lithuania. The North American accents of Edward Tuskenis, Carla Gruodis, Julius Palunis, Daina Kalendra, Loretta Stanulis, and the others-at first surprising to a long-distance caller-now have become familiar to one forced to cover the Baltic story by phone. Maybe years from now, one of them will surprise those who have forgotten today's events by speaking perfect "American," like Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Arens, who left the nation of his birth for the land of his religious and ethnic heritage.

The students say they will remain until physically removed by Soviet troops-a less than remote possibility. Watching" Lithuania by phone from across the Baltic, I get the feeling as days pass that I am witness to some incredible violence being carried out with subtle, hypnotic slowness. The parts of this glacial but deliberate movement appear trivial, but the whole taking shape is genuinely frightening. This is not a sudden lurch, not a mere series of misdirected reflexes or accidents. It appears that Gorbachev is working deliberately, behind a facade of rumors and disinformation to the effect that "the military" or some other impersonal villains are pressuring him. Speed up the frames and it looks like Czechoslovakia all over again. President Vytautas Landsbergis made the comparison to the events of 1968 in a radio interview I recorded with him. But it looks as if few people in the outside world are listening; all too many are still charmed by Gorbachev.

The worst story I have been told and I saved it for last-comes from someone claiming to be separated from the event described by only one intermediate source: While in Namibia last month, Secretary of State James Baker told Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze that the United States supported the Soviet plans to draft laws for how a republic could secede from the USSR, and that these should apply to Lithuania.

This amounts to undermining the United States' long-standing and publicly still affirmed non-recognition of the forcible incorporation of the Baltic states. With his secret diplomacy, Baker is attempting to balance the imagined Realpolitik of keeping Gorbachev enthroned as a "benevolent Czar" against the need to pay lip service to traditional American support for complete Baltic independence.

If this account is true, then Lithuania has already been sold down the river. Could the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact have been, even unthinkingly, given new life by private words on the soil of the world's newest free nation, Namibia? Events and history will show. The Baltic mice, as always, will pay for the dance of the eagle with the bear.

YOU HAVE to hand it to Mikhail Gorbachev: he has strangled the Lithuanian independence movement and simultaneously been congratulated for his restraint. After all, the chorus goes, he has not used military force; there have been no massacres in downtown Vilnius. This exercise in mass self-delusion is based on two major premises: first, that the West has a vested interest in Gorby's" reign; and second, that even if we didn't, there is nothing we can do about President Landsbergis's brave quest for his country's freedom.

On the first point, I reject the proposition that the democracies have a stake in Gorbachev's success. All of his decisions have been made on the basis of his perception of Soviet self-interest: in order to reform the command economy he had to put the command polity at risk. The objective consequence of this was the surge of political pluralism which we welcome, but Mikhail Sergeyevich is not a Jeffersonian Democrat. He is a Mafia capo trying to modernize the family business, not set up competitors. And he has to maintain the trust of his soldiers, however disappointing this may be to the Pope, President Bush, and the leaders of the European Community.

Indeed, Western leaders seem embarrassed by, if not annoyed at, the Lithuanian unilateral declaration of independence. As I listen to various commentaries on shortwave, I get the eerie feeling I have been here before. I have. In October and November 1956, when the Hungarians rose against their Stalinists, events went into slow motion, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles allowed as how we had no interest in intervening in the internal affairs of the Soviet bloc, and then Khrushchev struck. To the end of my days, I will recall the hollow sound of Hungarian stones bouncing off Soviet tanks. But the general reaction in American and NATO political circles was, Thank God that's over."

We seem to have soothed ourselves by pointing out Gorbachev's alleged refusal to use "military force." This is a matter of definition: as I pointed out to the Boston Herald, by this definition the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia was not forceful. Not a shot was fired. But your normal citizen who wakes up in the morning to find an armored personnel carrier parked in the street and a bunch of T-72 tanks joyriding around town is not likely to consider that the Soviets are practicing Gandhian nonviolence. The ultimate excuse will surely be that Gorbachev had to do it to protect himself from the Soviet hard-liners, notably the military.

However, without transforming Gorbachev into that strategist's dream, the "rational actor," I suspect that he and the military may be in complete accord on the Lithuanian operation. Let us look at recent events from the perspective of the Soviet general staff. For starters, Gorbachev went along with Brezhnev on the Afghan invasion, consistently upping the ante, until finally the senior officers on the ground, particularly General Dmitri Yazov (now Minister of Defense), convinced him it was a loser. As long as Najib's Afghans served as cannon fodder, it was not too bad, but then came the Stinger and Blowpipe SAMS, which started knocking down helicopters and Migs and killing Russians.

Yes, Russians-not Uzbeks, Tadzhiks, or Turkomen. A high Soviet military officer told a friend of mine that one of the reasons for withdrawing the massive Soviet presence from Afghanistan was "we were losing too many whites."' Without getting involved in demographic details, the cadres in the Soviet military are almost completely Slavic, and a significant source of skilled soldiers, sailors, and airmen has been the Baltic SSRS. An air-force defector said he had never heard of a pilot from Muslim Central Asia. Yet the next Soviet census is projected to show "whites" as a minority.

Second, Gorbachev has thrown his full support to the incredible military modernization program of the past decade, one featuring mobile ICBMS, a version of the B-1, and innumerable tanks, APCS, howitzers, subs, and other accessories. The removal of antique models (e.g., the SS-20) has been played up as disarmament. In short, Gorbachev has been a wholly cooperative member of the military-industrial complex.

Some may ask: My would the military go along with the chaos in Eastern Europe?" My view is that we have long underestimated their realism: pros who opposed the Afghan invasion, they knew the now Warsawless Pact was in a far more advanced state of decay than NATO. In 1915 a French marshal, opposing efforts to get Italy into World War I as an ally, allegedly noted that it would take seven divisions to conquer the Italians, ten to defend them; the Soviet commander-in-chief in Europe must have had similar concerns about his satellite forces. An economic analyst would add that the Pact was an immensely expensive welfare program.

In the Lithuanian case you had an identity of interest between Gorbachev and the military. Gorbachev wanted to stamp out a display of ethnic nationalism pour encourager les autres, as Napoleon said when he shot a general: i.e., to put a stop to the centrifugal rumblings in all corners of the Russian empire. The army's concern was that if the Lithuanians got away with deserting, the conscript force would rapidly disintegrate. This nonsense had to stop.

NOW COMES the big objection (made by Senator Kennedy to reinforce President Bush's de facto neutrality) that "Gorby" doesn't understand our negative attitude, that he wants U.S. friendship and is our indispensable Russian. It is true, we sent the wrong signals after the China sequence last summer-Gorbachev may well be awaiting a secret pilgrimage by Brent Scowcroft and Larry Eagleburger. And there was that choice comment by James Baker when Rumania was heating up, that we would not be heartbroken if the Soviets helped free rebellious Rumanians. (To Russians, who have a historic fondness for spheres of influence, this sounded like a hunting license-a rerun of Khrushchev's reading of Dulles.)

I think this line of argument absurd. We obviously can't "save" Lithuania, but Gorbachev desperately needs our economic and technological assistance. If we treat Lithuanian independence as a non-happening and take a boys-will-be-boys" posture, we become accomplices in strangling the next Soviet freedom movement. The President and Congress should turn off the tap; it won't help the Lithuanians much but it could influence Gorbachev's behavior toward, say, the Estonians, Latvians, and Georgians. We should be prudent in the defense of freedom, but we can never be neutral.