The Sajudis nationalist movement appeared to be headed for landmark victory Saturday in parliamentary elections that are expected to lead to a quick vote for Lithuanian secession from the Soviet Union.
Algirdas Brazauskas and other leaders of the defiant Lithuanian Communist Party that broke from Moscow two months ago defeated Sajudis candidates to win seats in the Baltic republic's Supreme Soviet. But election commission officials said Sajudis candidates seemed to be winning a comfortable majority."It's clear that Sajudis people are winning along with some popular public figures from the independent Communist Party," said election commission official Vilius Kavaliaskus.
Sajudis released unofficial election results showing that its candidates had won 73 seats in the 142-member Supreme Soviet, or Parliament, and were headed for victory in 22 other races.
Communist candidates won 16 seats, Sajudis figures said, but most of them were reformists supported by Sajudis, adding to the nationalist movement's drive to elect the first republican Parliament in the Soviet Union dominated by non-Communists.
The results, if confirmed by the election commission, would give Sajudis outright control of the Parliament and set the stage for Lithuania's independence from a half century of Soviet rule.
Lithuanian nationalists predicted Friday that a vote on secession would come soon after the elections.
"It is a great victory, but a little smaller than the Solidarity victory during the parliamentary elections in Poland" last year, said Algimantis Ckuolis, a member of the Sajudis 35-person executive council.
Brazauskas, head of the breakaway communists and president of the republic's Supreme Soviet, scored an overwhelming victory in the first official results announced by the election commission. Brazauskas, a likely presidential contender in a free Lithuania, won 91.7 percent of the votes in his district.
Other official results gave election victories to independent Communist officials Jusdus Paleckis and Kastudis Glaveckas and to popular Lithuanian writer Romas Gudaitis and lawyer Kazimieras Motieka, both prominent Sajudis candidates.
As voters flocked to the polls Saturday, many residents said the elections opened a new chapter in Lithuanian history because the Parliament would be chosen democratically for the first time since the USSR absorbed the tiny nation, along with neighboring Estonia and Latvia, in 1940.
"The nation will choose its own Parliament," said Wladyslaw Mackiewicz, one of Lithuania's 400,000 ethnic Poles. "Soviet rule has ruined us, and we have to repair everything."
Signs of Lithuanian nationalism were evident during the balloting. The yellow, green and red Lithuanian national flag fluttered under sunny skies at hundreds of polling stations throughout the Baltic republic, where Lithuanians chose a 142-seat Supreme Soviet from among 473 candidates.
The red Soviet banner with its hammer and sickle was conspicuously absent, as were the huge portraits and busts of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin.
In the capital of Vilnius, voting was orderly with 10-minute waits the maximum. Most voters quickly made their choices in booths cloaked by red curtains and then dropped the single-page ballots in a box at each polling station.
Sabina Samko, in charge of Polling Station 22 in the large Naujoji Vilna district on the outskirts of Vilnius, said the new Parliament will face the difficult task of transforming Lithuania into a modern country.
"The problem of independence is the most important for us," she said.
The polls closed at 8 p.m. after 12 hours of voting in the republic's first fully democratic elections in five decades. The election commission said 75.5 percent of Lithuania's 2.6 million eligible voters went to the polls.
The balloting was watched by some international observers. Eight Canadian lawmakers monitored the voting at various polling stations. A Sajudis official said four U.S. congressmen invited by the group to observe the voting had finally received visas after an initial delay by Soviet officials.
The Lithuanian Communist Party's break from Moscow prompted Mikhail Gorbachev to travel to secession-minded Lithuania last month. The visit became a forum for fierce debate on Lithuanian independence, with Gorbachev warning the republic was "setting sail without a compass."
But Gorbachev also promised a new law providing a legal mechanism for secession for all 15 Soviet republics. Such legislation is being drafted in the Soviet Parliament.