Tass

Lithuania and the Soviet Union's largest republic have signed an unprecedented trade and economic cooperation treaty that bypasses the central government, the official Tass news agency reported today. The treaty signed yesterday between Lithuania and the Russian republic is the first of its kind between two Soviet republics. It is the result of Russian republican President Boris Yeltsin's offer last month to negotiate a range of political, economic and social treaties with other republics.

The official news agency Tass yesterday accused the editors of the independent Soviet magazine Glasnost of breaking the law by using "printing equipment" belonging to a state institution. According to two employees of a state printing house, Tass said, Glasnost editor Sergei Grigoryants and other workers of the fledgling magazine had produced materials illegally on the premises over a long period and "were plundering state property. " The charge followed the arrests Thursday of two members of the magazine's editorial staff, and the seizure of about 50 typewritten copies of the latest edition of the journal.

Visitors from another planet, with tiny heads on 10-to-13-foot bodies, disembarked from their disk-shaped spaceship and strolled around a park in the Soviet Union recently, frightened a few Soviet citizens and took off, the official news agency Tass matter-of-factly reported yesterday. At the landing site, in the Russian city of Voronezh, scientists subsequently found evidence of the visit by the aliens and their spacecraft, Tass reported. They also found two pieces of a rocklike substance not previously found on Earth, the agency said.

An accident has damaged a nuclear reactor at a giant power plant in the Ukraine, Soviet news media said yesterday, adding that some people had been injured but giving few details. The accident was said to have sent a radioactive cloud sweeping north to Scandinavia, with the level of radioactivity 10 times higher than normal in some areas. However, there were no indications that radioactivity had reached a danger point anywhere outside the Soviet Union. Initial reports from the official Soviet news agency Tass did not say whether anyone had been killed or injured in the accident, but Tass later said that "aid is being given to those who have suffered injury.

A Soviet flight attendant and three passengers were killed Tuesday when "armed criminals" attempted to hijack an Aeroflot airliner during a domestic flight, the official news agency Tass reported yesterday. Most of the hijackers were killed during the attempt to seize the Tupelov- 154 jet and fly it out of the country, Tass said, and the rest were captured. Tass did not say how many hijackers there were or how the surviving hijackers were overpowered. "As a result of the act of terrorism, an air hostess and three passengers were killed," Tass said.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev announced today he was proposing the dissolution of the super-ministry which has run the country's agriculture for just over three years. Gorbachev made the announcement as he convened the Communist Party's top policy-making body today for a special meeting on the worsening food shortages that threaten to derail his entire reform program. Gorbachev himself created the giant Gosagropom super-ministry in November 1985 in his initial bid to revive Soviet agriculture.

Two people were reported killed yesterday during a new outbreak of violence in the disputed southern Soviet region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The official news agency Tass said two members of the enclave's Azerbaijani minority died when a gang of Armenians with guns ambushed them on the outskirts of Kirkidzhan village, near the capital, Stepanakert. A third Azerbaijani was seriously wounded. On the roads around Stepanakert, Armenians blockaded streets with iron plates and telegraph poles, Tass said, and in the village of Khodzhali, Azerbaijanis built barricades of cars.

A passenger train from Leningrad to Moscow derailed and caught fire yesterday, killing 17 people and injuring 95, Tass and a Soviet official reported. The official news agency today said the Aurora train left the tracks between the Berezaika and Poplavenets stations north of Moscow at 6:34 p.m. yesterday. Anatoly N. Sobin, director of the Leningrad railway station in Moscow, told The Associated Press the train was carrying 760 passengers when it crashed about 220 miles north of the capital.

The first known bankruptcy under the Soviet system surfaced yesterday when the official Tass news agency reported the financial collapse of a Leningrad construction trust with 2,000 employees. Tass said the bankruptcy occurred because the trust often fell behind schedule in its operations, overran its cost limits and produced low-quality work. The Leningrad business had been required to pay its own way under a policy that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev instituted to make state companies more productive.

Two armed men officially described as drug addicts killed two Soviet policemen, hijacked an airplane and shot two passengers to death before they were killed by KGB troops and police who stormed the plane, the Soviet news media reported today. The Soviet news agency Tass said the other 74 passengers and the crew were not hurt during the rescue. The incident, which occurred Saturday night in the Ural Mountains city of Ufa, 720 miles east of Moscow, appeared to be the most violent hijacking drama in the Soviet Union in almost three years.

They're graying radicals now, more or less respectably settled family folks. But leaders of Philadelphia's once-flamboyant anti-war movement will be reliving it all tonight with - how else? - a potluck supper in Powelton. Leaders of Philadelphia Resistance, which had its heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s, have organized the reunion around the book promotion visit of veteran pacifist David Dellinger, whose autobiography is called, "From Yale to Jail. " The hosts are Joshua Markel and Eva Gold, who met and married as anti-war student activists.

Henry Holtzman, a Cherry Hill industrial scriptwriter and self-styled armchair historian, has performed an estimable public service in researching, and writing a play about, the patriotism of more than three score black soldiers who helped win a rousing Revolutionary War victory over Hessian mercenaries in the Battle of Red Bank on Oct. 22, 1777. Holtzman's play, "Heroes' Feast," is in its world-premiere production by Venture Theatre at Stage III of Temple University's Center City campus through April 12. The research, in my judgment, is going to outlive the play by a long shot.

The failure of perestroika in the Soviet Union has been apparent for some time. Now, following the crackdown in Lithuania, glasnost - the other byword of the Gorbachev era - is taking it on the chin. Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, stung by criticism of the bloodshed in Vilnius, has proposed suspending the nation's proud new press law, which bans government censorship. The parliament rejected that notion, assigning to a parliamentary committee the Orwellian task of working out "measures to ensure objectivity" in news coverage.

Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis has told the pro-independence Sajudis movement that direct Soviet rule may be imposed in the restive Baltic region, and he urged Sajudis members to prepare to resist, Tass reported yesterday. The official Soviet news agency quoted Landsbergis as telling Sajudis- backed lawmakers on Saturday that "there are signs that rule of this kind has already been introduced surreptitiously. " The report did not say what those signs were, although leaders of independence movements in the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have contended in recent weeks that the Kremlin is preparing to crack down on them.

Talk about red tape. If you are thinking of sending a Christmas parcel, surface mail, to the Soviet Union, it will get there a tad late. Like around Valentine's Day. If you're lucky. By Easter? Mozhet byit. ("Perhaps it's possible. ") By surface mail, it takes six to 10 weeks for the U.S. Postal Service to deliver a package to the Soviet Union - or seven to 10 days by air mail, but airborne postage can cost more than the contents. (For a 10-pound package, it's $69.15, compared with $16.60 by surface.

Lithuania and the Soviet Union's largest republic have signed an unprecedented trade and economic cooperation treaty that bypasses the central government, the official Tass news agency reported today. The treaty signed yesterday between Lithuania and the Russian republic is the first of its kind between two Soviet republics. It is the result of Russian republican President Boris Yeltsin's offer last month to negotiate a range of political, economic and social treaties with other republics.

The Soviet legislature passed a bill yesterday to guarantee press freedom and eliminate censorship, ending a tradition of state control of information that predates the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The new press law should permit dozens of struggling independent newspapers and journals to function legally, acquire offices and compete for access to normal printing facilities. "The law is the first in the history of the Soviet state to give detailed guarantees of the freedom of the press and the rights of journalists," the official news agency Tass said.

The Russian Federation led by Boris Yeltsin, the main political rival to President Mikhail Gorbachev, today declared that its constitution now took precedence over Soviet laws. The Kremlin, already grappling with a Baltic independence drive that threatens to tear the country apart, seemed certain to reject the move by the Russian Federation, the biggest and most influential of the Soviet Union's 15 republics. The Congress of People's Deputies of the Russian Republic, the Federation's parliament, approved by 544 votes to 271 an article that declared that Soviet law which conflicts with sovereign Russian rights "are suspended by the republic on its territory," the official Tass news agency reported.

The Soviet parliament today backed a proposal to create a new powerful executive presidency which is almost certain to be filled by Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The official news agency Tass said the Supreme Soviet, the inner parliament, voted overwhelmingly in favor of creating the new post. This was despite criticism of provisions of the proposal by radical deputies during today's debate. However, a final decision must be taken by the Congress of People's Deputies, the country's supreme legislature.

In the latest outbreak of ethnic unrest in the Soviet Union, mobs of citizens, some of them drunk or on drugs, went on a three-day rampage along the Iranian border in the southern republic of Azerbaijan, the official news agency Tass said yesterday. Tass said that crowds in the Nakhichevan region, 1,200 miles south of Moscow, threatened border guards, wrecked frontier installations and tried to cross into Iran illegally. The violence began Sunday and continued through yesterday, the agency said.