Lithuanian candidates backed by a pro-independence nationalist movement trounced the Communist Party and swept to victory in the republic's first free multiparty elections in seven decades, official results showed Monday.
"The new Lithuanian Parliament is to usher a new phase in the republic's history, in which Communists will probably no longer play the leading role," Cheslavas Jurshenas, a spokesman for Lithuania's Council of Ministers, told the official news agency Tass.
The news agency said 90 deputies have so far been elected to the the 141-member Lithuanian Parliament in the Saturday balloting and 72 of them are Sajudis, an umbrella group supporting candidates who backed its drive for independence.
The Sajudis claimed a landslide victory Sunday, and the Tass dispatch from Vilnius Monday officially confirmed the election results.
But Rupsyte Augonite, a Sajudis leader, and Tass said there would have to be runoff elections in 45 races in which no candidate won more than half the votes. He said six races would have to be held again because of voting irregularities.
The runoffs will take place March 10 and the repeated elections April 7, Augonite said. He said the new Parliament cannot convene yet because two-thirds of its members have not been elected.
The official newspaper Pravda and Augonite gave the results in the 90 seats elected so far as follows: 48 non-party, 22 independent Communists, 7 rump Communists loyal to Moscow, nine Social Democrats, two Christian Democrats and two Greens.
The elections brought into official politics for the first time Sajudis movement leader Vitautas Landsbergis and other top Sajudis chiefs Romualdas Ozolas and Bronyus Genzyalis, who were elected to serve in the republic's legislature.
The bulk of the Communists who were elected belonged to the new Independent Communist Party, which broke away from Moscow in December and also advocates independence for the largely Catholic republic annexed to the Soviet Union in 1940.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people gathered for peaceful pro-democracy protests that stretched across 11 time zones from the Far East to the Volga River heartland of Russia.
"Our children, who will live in a free country, will remember this day and our decisiveness," radical Deputy Gavril Popov told an estimated half-million people in Moscow Sunday who participated in the largest pro-democracy demonstration in Soviet history.
The protesters along the Soviet capital's main Garden Ring road were cheered by people leaning from windows, grouped on balconies and standing on the rooftops of huge apartment buildings built by dictator Josef Stalin.
In other developments:
- MOLDAVIANS voted in their first free elections under Soviet rule and expressed hopes their new Parliament would be able to win greater sovereignty from Moscow. Many voters who gathered in parks after casting their ballots seemed excited by the prospect of a new government and the ability to choose candidates.
-THE BELGRADE stock exchange, the first of its kind in Communist-ruled Yugoslavia, resumed trading Monday after a break of almost half a century. The Belgrade exchange, founded by four of Yugoslavia's largest banks, initially will handle only government bonds but soon will start trading stocks issued by private companies.
-EAST GERMANY Monday began accepting applications for unemployment benefits for the first time in the Communist nation's 40-year history. Unofficial estimates contend that 70,000 East Germans are unemployed, but Labor Ministry spokesman Joachim Guenter said the number of applicants was far lower than had been expected. Authorities speculated about 4,000 people would seek the new insurance.
-DAVID GOLDFARB, the Soviet Jewish geneticist who battled authorities for seven years before he was allowed to emigrate to the United States in 1986, died of heart failure Saturday in a Washington, D.C., hospital. He was 71. Goldfarb gained world attention as a "refusenik" in the early 1980s after his numerous requests to leave the Soviet Union were nixed by authorities. The scientist and his wife, Cecilia, finally received permission to leave the country in 1986 through the efforts of American industrialist Armand Hammer.