America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

VILNIUS. While Russia was electing its first real President, the Baltic republics were going about their own democratic business. In Estonia, four anticommunist parties pushed for legislation to break up collective farms and convert them into private plots. In Latvia, parliamentarians vigorously debated emergency health care for local soldiers who helped clean up the Chernobyl disaster five years ago. In Lithuania, the Supreme Council passed a new social-welfare bill that will require raising taxes.

The Balts' strategy is to achieve sovereignty in increments. They have already established their own border posts and invited Western economists to advise them on how to set up their own banks. They are trying to introduce their own systems of insurance and taxation as well as their own postage stamps and passports. Two weeks ago, the three Baltic governments called on the KGB to abolish its branch offices in the republics. Last week the three Presidents announced their intention to sign an international treaty curbing the spread of nuclear weapons. They were putting the Soviet Union on notice that it must someday remove its nukes from their territory.

Sooner or later, however, the Balts need the Kremlin's acquiescence to be truly independent. For that they are counting on a combination of pressures from inside and outside the U.S.S.R.

Most Balts were rooting for Boris Yeltsin to win the Russian presidency. "During Yeltsin's campaign he backed our cause," says Marju Lauristin, head of the Estonian Social Democratic Party. "However, he was severely attacked for doing so, and even with his new mandate, there will continue to be political forces hostile to us."

$ Mavriks Vulfsons, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Latvian parliament, agrees that Yeltsin's victory is a "glimmer of hope," but he warns: "Hard-line imperialists have lost a battle, not the war."

Vulfsons believes that Gorbachev is still indispensable as President of the U.S.S.R. "Gorbachev is a brilliant tactician," he says. "Only he can keep control over the dark underside of Russian nationalism, particularly in its colonialist form."

That force erupted on two bloody Sundays in January, when Black Beret special forces and other Soviet units killed at least 18 people in Vilnius and Riga. Last Friday, Black Berets burned a Lithuanian customs post on the Latvian border and severely beat an unarmed guard. The entrances to official buildings throughout the Baltics are barricaded with concrete slabs, some decorated with patriotic murals. Now Moscow is threatening to impose economic sanctions on any republic that secedes, and the general staff of the armed forces is insisting that the Baltic governments pay "financial compensation" for any of their citizens who resist the draft.

Ironically, this may turn out to be good news. By demanding that the Balts fork over what amounts to reparations for living under Soviet occupation for 51 years, Moscow seems to have conceded the principle of freedom and opened the bidding on its price. "We are ready to start negotiations any time," says Lithuanian Vice President Ceslovas Stankevicius.

Gorbachev will be in London next month, hat in hand, appealing for aid from the major industrialized democracies. If the leaders there oblige him with any money at all, they should make clear they are underwriting not just the future of reform inside the U.S.S.R. but the right of the Balts to leave without being mugged on their way out the door. Call it ransom -- but it would be worth it.