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The paradox is that Gorbachev's campaign for economic reforms and political liberalization has drawn a more enthusiastic response from the three Baltic republics than from almost anywhere else in the country. The emergence of independent splinter groups like the Lithuanian Party of Democrats, the Estonian Christian Union and the Latvian National Independence Movement has already created something approximating a multiparty system in the Baltics. The Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian delegations to the new Congress of the People's Deputies have proved to be the star pupils of the Gorbachev School of Democracy. The Estonians noted how one young Central Asian deputy from Kirgizia, sitting across the aisle, began to vote along with them -- until he was shifted to the opposite side of his delegation.
If most of the country is moving at a snail's pace in carrying out perestroika, the relatively more prosperous Baltic states have been pressing the Kremlin to go further with economic reforms. Moscow officials have opposed the idea of independent national currencies, but that has not stopped the three republics from drafting plans to reduce the flood of Soviets who come from the rest of the country to buy scarce goods in better-supplied Baltic shops. The Estonians discuss establishing their own credit-card system, and the Latvians talk about creating an alternative currency as early as next January. It would be paid to local workers and redeemable in special stores. Last month the Supreme Soviet finally gave Estonia and Lithuania the green light to try running their economies free of interference from central ministries in Moscow. If these experiments prove successful, the three Baltic states could serve as the economic locomotive Gorbachev badly needs to pull the country's other twelve republics toward perestroika.
Of course, such a scenario would derail if the Baltic republics decided instead to uncouple totally from the Soviet train. Emotions are running particularly high this month because of the 50th anniversary of the Molotov- Ribbentrop pact, the treaty signed by the Foreign Ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that opened the way for Moscow's occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940. In downtown Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, a group of young hunger strikers has set up a makeshift shelter decorated with placards calling for liquidation of the Nazi-Soviet pact. HOW LONG WILL THE RED ARMY BE MASTER OF OUR LAND, declares a poster with a blood-red footprint on a map of the republic. On Aug. 23, the date of the agreement, popular-front groups hope to organize a human chain from Estonia to Lithuania, a sort of Hands Across the Baltics.