Lithuania

Each time their phone rang Wednesday evening, Algimantas and Kathryn Grintalis jumped and their hopes soared.For four days they had been trying to get through to their homeland of Lithuania, trying to contact a close friend for first-hand news of the bloody Soviet crackdown against the Baltic state's fledgling democratic government."

VILNIUS, Lithuania - The fighter jets that landed this week at the airfield northwest of here do not pose much of a threat, but their arrival at what was once one of the Soviet Union's largest bases underlined in bold the new borders being drawn between Europe and Russia. The jets - four Belgian F-16s supported by 100 Belgian, Danish and Norwegian troops - have come to police the skies over the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, former Soviet republics that officially joined NATO on Monday, along with Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

When President George Bush announced U.S. recognition of the independence of the Baltic states on Monday, it was cause for celebration.The local Lithuanian community was euphoric."

RAIMONDA BUTKUS was 10 years old when her family defected from Lithuania to the United States to begin a new life.In 1972, Raimonda arrived in Chicago with her stepfather, Zigmas Butkus; her mother, Danute Butkus; her sister, Loretta, 11; and her brother, Rimvydas, 3. Plans for the move to the United States were unknown to the children and relatives. The family left not knowing whether they would see relatives again.Twenty-four years later -- Soviet domination of her country having ended -- Raimonda can send letters and visit relatives in Lithuania.

VILNIUS, Lithuania -- The unforgiving past is so much with this place, so relentlessly at your elbow, that it comes as a complete surprise to find the Sarunas Hotel, surely the only hotel in Europe (or anywhere else) named for a professional basketball player.Sarunas Marciulionis, a guard for the Golden State Warriors of the National Basketball Association, a Lithuanian who made good elsewhere but is still a hero in his native land, not only lent his name to the hotel but owns it.And he's given it a certain American bounce.

VILNIUS, Lithuania -- Balys Gajauskas spent 37 years in Sovie prison camps, and now he's getting even in a way that some suspect is designed to help his party in today's national election.Mr. Gajauskas is the leader of a parliamentary commission charged with exposing and rooting out his old enemies, the agents of the KGB, the former Soviet security police.He goes about his work with a cold zeal. His targets are among the elite of Lithuania. They include a former prime minister.He is also in the inner circle of Sajudis, the movement that brought independence to Lithuania -- and that faces considerable disenchantment among voters in today's parliamentary elections.

If Lithuania were located over a large pool of oil, it, too, could participate in the New World Order. But geology, not merely geography, is destiny these days, so Lithuania must be content to play the lesser role of a lesson: America, be careful when minting moral imperatives.The Soviet crackdown on Lithuania could not have come at a less convenient time for the Bush administration. Coming on the eve of what may be the first large war of the post-Cold War reign of perpetual peace, the Soviet action, and the limp U.S. response to it, underscore the moral ambiguity of the U.S. undertaking in the Gulf.

LITHUANIA: SHORT STORIES.Joe Ashby Porter.Johns Hopkins University.144 pages. $26;$10.95 paperback.Ever since his luminous and sly island romance "Felgrass" appeared from New Directions in 1977, Joe Ashby Porter has been a writer's writer -- that is, a writer admired by other writers and almost unknown to the general reader. Mr. Porter is a Shakespeare scholar as well as a creative artist, and "Felgrass" grafted "The Tempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" onto the Edenic first days of druggy youth culture in America.

MOSCOW -- Despite claims to the contrary by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and other Soviet officials, support among Russians and other ethnic minorities in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia for independence from the Soviet Union is substantial and growing fast in the wake of recent violence by Soviet troops, polls show.The polls show the misleading nature of a barrage of telegrams and letters from Russian-speakers repeatedly cited by Mr. Gorbachev in backing his hard line against Baltic independence and the elected leaders who advocate it. A former KGB general said last week that such telegram campaigns are often organized by the security agency.

After six years of reform and hope, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is now heading a government that seems to be returning to the policies of duplicity and lawlessness. Unless this can be halted, Lithuania will be only the beginning of a mournful journey back to the Stalinist past.In Lithuania, a democratically elected constitutional government is gradually being overthrown by paratroopers answering the call of a shadowy group of pro-Moscow communists. Such "calls for help" by quislings have been a standard Soviet tactic, from the forced 1940 annexation of the Baltic republics to the invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.