A press campaign, apparently orchestrated by the Kremlin, stepped up the pressure from Moscow Friday on independence campaigners in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party`s official newspaper, criticized party leaders in Lithuania who sided with the growing freedom movement there. Pravda accused independence activists in Lithuania of waging a campaign of ”moral and physical terror” and warned darkly of ”unpredictable consequences” if the republic seceded from the USSR.
At the same time, Sovietskaya Rossiya, the organ of the Russian Federation`s Communist Party, published a statement by local party members in Moscow attacking a new election law in Estonia as ”discriminatory” against ethnic Russians there.
At the Soviet Foreign Ministry, spokesman Yuri Gremitskikh criticized
”extremists” in the Baltic states, urged ”a more careful and sensible view” and quoted unnamed Western analysts as saying that ”rocking the Soviet multinational boat means also rocking the European and global boat.”
The rapid growth of independence fervor in the Baltics has presented Moscow with the greatest threat yet that its empire of 15 republics and dozens of smaller regions might break up.
The articles were the latest counterattack to this threat by what is known as the ”central press”-the Moscow-based newspapers, especially those controlled by the Communist Party, which circulate throughout the Soviet Union.
Local newspapers in the Baltic states themselves, even those speaking for local Communist Parties, have been much more sympathetic to calls for autonomy, if not outright independence.
Party and government leaders in the Baltic region have complained bitterly that the ”central press” articles are ”one-sided and untruthful.” The prime minister of Estonia, Indrik Toome, has called them ”tendentious”
and ”stupid.”
Many independence activists believe the press campaign is run by Soviet leaders in an attempt to quell the movement. The tone and similar wording of the articles supports this belief.
Some in the Baltics believe President Mikhail Gorbachev supports this campaign. Others think Kremlin conservatives are taking advantage of Gorbachev`s current absence from Moscow on vacation to batter the Baltics in the party press.
The attacks increased this week around the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which laid the groundwork for the Soviet seizure of the three Baltic states. On the anniversary, an estimated 1 million citizens of the states formed a 370-mile human chain to dramatize their desire for independence.
Many Communist Party leaders and members, as well as Baltic government officials, joined the chain. This was the one thing that most upset Pravda.
”The party leaders of the republics should express their stand more clearly,” it said, meaning they should oppose independence.
”The lack of clarity in the stands of the republic leaders is manifest.”
