And Now, Divorce?

He touched down in Vilnius the dignified statesman, expecting to rely on his charm and diplomatic skills to work out a compromise. But when the first cry of Samostoyatelnost! -- independence -- sounded from the Lithuanian crowd, Mikhail Gorbachev rapidly abandoned the strategies of genteel diplomacy and adopted the tactics of a ward politician bent on maintaining his lock on a balking constituency. "Independence?" he shouted above the insistent cries. "Let's have it. At the workplace. In cities. Republics. But together!"

Wading into crowds, the Soviet President proved himself a master of street theater, improvising historical, philosophical and legalistic arguments as he pressed his appeal to Lithuanians to step back from their threatened breach with Moscow. When his entreaties met with smiles and shouts of "Bravo, Gorbachev!" he answered with poignant appeals. "My personal fate is linked to this choice," he reminded the crowds. When he read resistance in the faces of his listeners, he fumed and lectured, employing the Socratic method to grill his audience.

At a Vilnius fuel-machinery plant, he spied a sign in Russian reading not more rights but full independence. "Who gave you that?" Gorbachev challenged a Lithuanian welder. When the worker replied that he had made the sign, Gorbachev switched to a softer approach, commending the man on his grasp of Russian. But the worker would have none of Gorbachev's compliments. "You don't think we know how to write in Russian?" he challenged. "We can read and speak Russian too, while there are lots of Russians who can't speak a word of Lithuanian."

"How do you understand independence?" Gorbachev shot back.

"I was born independent," came the response. "And I want to die independent."

Never had Gorbachev sustained such an energetic performance -- but never had his political skills been so severely tested. "I have never had such discussions anywhere in the Soviet Union," he observed later. For months Gorbachev has sat back calmly and allowed the disintegration of the Communists' monopoly on power in Eastern Europe. Now, when one of his own republics was demanding the same opportunity for democratic self-rule, Gorbachev was far less relaxed about it. There could be no pretending that Lithuania's demands to secede from the union were an isolated appeal. If the nation is divided over issues of language, culture, politics and religion, it is united in its dissatisfaction with economic problems. As goes Lithuania, so might go other republics -- thus inviting a military crackdown and destroying perestroika. "If even the slightest suppression occurs, or a misunderstanding, say, in Estonia or Moldavia," Gorbachev warned, "it spills over to the rest of the country."

As if to drive home his point, the fires of defiance and threatened revolution burned brightly throughout the Soviet Union last week. From the southern Caucasus republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia to the Baltic states in the north, ethnic tensions flared and independence movements battled with Communist Party officials. The most troubled spots: