VILNIUS, Lithuania, U.S.S.R. -- Residents of Lithuania voted overwhelmingly Saturday to affirm the Baltic republic's drive for independence from the Soviet Union, officials announced early Sunday.
The balloting was held in defiance of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who launched a military crackdown in the Baltics a month ago and decreed the non-binding poll illegal. Instead, he ordered the republic to participate in a March 17 referendum on keeping the Soviet Union intact.
'A great majority of people in Lithuania no longer have any fear and once again have expressed their determination (to seceed from the Soviet Union) to the world,' Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis declared on Lithuanian television after preliminary results were announced.
'They have said what kind of Lithuania they will live in, what kind of Lithuania they will leave their children.'
Vytautas Litvinas, deputy chairman of the Lithuanian Election Committee said preliminary results showed 90.47 percent of those who voted answered 'yes' to the question, 'Do you agree that the Lithuanian state should be an independent democratic republic?'
Litvinas said 84.43 percent of the 2.65 million eligible voters cast ballots Saturday. He added that 6.56 percent voted against the proposition, and 2.97 percent of the ballots cast had no answer or were otherwise declared invalid.
Landsbergis said the plebiscite 'one more step along the road' to independence but acknowledged that Moscow might still choose to 'disregard the obvious will of the people.'
He alluded to the military crackdown that led to the killing of 14 people last month at a Lithuanian television tower, vowing Lithuanians would not succumb to Soviet 'intimidation.' He quoted a well-known Lithuanian poet who wrote, 'Even in the worst of times, we sing with inextinguishable hope.'
Lithuanians living outside their homeland participated in the poll via absentee ballot in places as far away as remote Siberia and the Transcaucasian republic of Armenia, news reports said. Military officers on long-term duty in the republic were eligible to vote but conscripts were ineligible.
Government officials said received no reports of Soviet military movements or conflicts during 13 hours of voting. As of 2 a.m. Sunday, there had been no reports of interference with voting or vote counting, Litvinus said.
The Kremlin scheduled a 10-day military exercise to begin Sunday in all three Baltic republics, but a Soviet commander said the maneuvers were routine and would be staged outside main cities.
Lithuanian Parliament spokesman Haris Subacius said that turnout in the plebiscite exceeded the 75.5 percent threshold reached a year ago when the republic elected a nationalist parliament that declared independence in March.
About 100 uniformed young men who belong to the new Lithuanian national guard filed into the Vilnius legislator's main lobby at midday to cast their ballots.
Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis said he hoped the vote would be a strong signal to both Moscow and the West of Lithuania's determination to achieve full independence.
'This is once again the Lithuanian people expressing their will,' Landsbergis said. 'This counters the Soviet propaganda that has attempted to mislead not only the West, but the Soviet people.'
Informal surveys by journalists outside polling stations found overwhelming support for the question: 'Do you agree that Lithuania should be an independent, democratic republic?'
Ethnic Lithuanians, who make up about 80 percent of the republic's 3. 7 million people, appeared unanimous in their support for independence, and a vast majority of the ethnic Russians and Poles interviewed also said they favor secession.
The plebiscite took place four weeks after Soviet soldiers in tanks stormed Lithuania's television and radio center in a raid that left 14 people dead.
Gorbachev's military crackdown, in an effort to reassert Moscow's authority in the Baltics, seemed to have increased support for Lithuanian independence.
'Before the events at the television tower, I did not know,' said Tatyana Dobrovoskaya, a Russian woman who voted in the capital of Vilnius' Naujoji-Vilnia district. 'I probably would have voted no. But after the events of the 13th, I am sure that I do not want to live in the Soviet Union.'
An older ethnic Polish woman voting in Vilnius' Old City said: 'Of course I am for independence. Don't believe the propaganda (from Moscow). It is time we stopped living according to the Kremlin.'
Several elderly Russian women in Nauujoji-Vilna said they voted 'no' because they agreed with Gorbachev that Lithuania is an integral part of the Soviet Union and independence would lead to more discrimination against minority ethnic groups.
'Independence would be bad,' said a 68-year-old woman who gave only first name of Yetrosinia.
The woman said she has lived in Lithuania since 1944, four years after it was annexed by the Soviet Union along with Estonia and Latvia.
'I don't want to be exploited,' she said. 'I don't want to live in a bourgeois state.'
Soviet Communists frequently refer to Lithuania's independence between the two world wars as its 'bourgeois period.'
The U.S. consul-general in Leningrad, Richard Miles, joined about 80 observers from a dozen countries to monitor the voting.
The Lithuanian government and observers from the Sajudis independence front and other parties said there were no reports of serious irregularities in the voting or attempts to disrupt the polls.
Gediminas Avenue, Vilnius' main street formerly named after Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin, was closed to traffic. The parliament was surrounded by concrete slabs plastered with anti-Soviet cartoons, posters and children's drawings of tanks symbolically crushing freedom.
Lithuanians cast their votes on small orange-and-white ballots printed in Lithuanian, Russian and Polish at more than 2,000 polling places flying the yellow-green-and-red Lithuanian flag.
Government workers and volunteers who have maintained a constant watch at the Vilnius legislature voted inside the modern granite-and- glass building, still surrounded by concrete barricades and sandbag fortifications against a feared Soviet military assault.
