Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 8, 1990                   TAG: 9004080075
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MOSCOW                                LENGTH: Medium

LATVIA REFUSES TO BREAK PARTY TIES WITH MOSCOW

The two events underscored the different pace at which the neighboring Baltic republics are moving as their residents clash over attempts to restore the independence lost in 1940 with their forced incorporation into the Soviet Union.

Lithuania's Parliament, like the republic as a whole dominated by ethnic Lithuanians, declared independence March 11.

Latvian pro-independence politicians have been unable to go as far as those in Lithuania because the indigenous population comprises only 54 percent of the republic's 2.7 million population. Russians make up about 33 percent, Byelorussians 5 percent and Poles and Ukraines 3 percent each.

About 270 delegates, most of them ethnic Latvians, walked out of a party congress on its second day after a draft platform that would have established an autonomous Latvian Communist Party was voted down, a journalist reported.

Alex Grigoriev, an editor of a grassroots political group's newspaper, said by telephone from the Latvian capital, Riga, that a majority of the 800 or so delegates thought the platform would have gone too far toward independence. The platform stopped short of a complete break from the Moscow-based national Communist Party.

The delegates who stormed out of the session had favored a more radical platform that would have formally split the 177,000-member Latvian party from Moscow. But they supported another version calling for autonomy, preserving some ties with Moscow, Grigoriev explained. That version, which was voted down, apparently had the support of the republic's leadership and the Kremlin, the journalist said.

After they left, the radical delegates met separately in the same building where the congress was held, the Political Education House, and planned another session of their own April 14 to form a separate party.

In the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, a crowd official media estimated at 300,000 massed for the largest pro-independence rally since the republic's Parliament voted March 11 to secede from the Soviet Union, escalating a clash of wills with the Kremlin.

The size of the rally, held in a park, called into question the Kremlin's emphasis on what it claims is widespread opposition in Lithuania to independence. Anti-independence rallies in Vilnius have attracted only 50,000 to 100,000 residents. Lithuania's population is 3.8 million.