98% of Georgians Vote to Declare Republic Independent : Soviet Union: The question now is how to restore the statehood lost 70 years ago, lawmakers say. The Kremlin threatens a state of emergency.

MOSCOW —  In a further challenge to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s efforts to hold the Soviet Union together, voters in the southern republic of Georgia have almost unanimously endorsed a call for its full independence from Moscow, Georgian officials said Monday, announcing the results of a weekend referendum.

With a turnout of 90.53% among Georgia’s 3.4 million voters, 98.93% voted for the restoration of the republic’s independent statehood after 70 years as part of the Soviet Union, Georgian election officials said.

“The referendum shows how strongly we feel about independence, though achieving it is another matter,” Gudja Khundadze, a spokesman for the Georgian Parliament, said in Tbilisi, the capital.

“It will be very difficult now for Gorbachev to keep Georgia in the Soviet Union. We might be the first or one of the first to leave.”

In Moscow, however, the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, recommended that Gorbachev use his presidential powers and impose a state of emergency in northern Georgia, where ethnic violence has claimed nearly 100 lives this year.

This would allow Gorbachev to deploy more troops in the area, known as Southern Ossetia, and perhaps slow Georgia’s drive toward independence. But the move would be resisted fiercely by Georgia’s growing paramilitary units and probably lead to far greater conflict than the country has seen.

Fearing that they will be dispossessed by Georgian nationalists, who came to power in elections last year, the Ossetians have opposed independence for the republic and see continued Soviet rule as their protection. Many would like the area removed from Georgia and united with Northern Ossetia, across the border in the Russian Federation, in an Ossetian republic.

Georgians view all this as further evidence of Ossetian perfidy. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the Georgian president, warned again on the weekend that there would be no place for what he called “enemies of the people” in independent Georgia.

Gorbachev formally called on Gamsakhurdia on Saturday to take steps to halt the bloodshed in Southern Ossetia, and Gamsakhurdia replied Monday with a call on the “Soviet leadership to refrain from destabilizing the situation further.”

Four people were reported killed in the region Sunday, according to the official Soviet news agency Tass, and the Soviet Interior Ministry, which has troops in the area, said that paramilitary units on both sides are continuing to fire at one another with rifles, machine guns and--increasingly--mortars and even rockets.

Although Gorbachev is probably reconciled to Georgia’s eventual secession, along with that of the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, he has tried to slow their departure, declaring such referendums as Georgia’s illegal and insisting that republics wanting to secede must comply with Soviet law to do so.

Gorbachev is battling to stem the Soviet Union’s collapse as a state and thus to win time to persuade other republics of the need of a “renewed federation,” which was endorsed by three-quarters of the voters who went to the polls in a countrywide referendum two weeks ago.

Georgia boycotted that vote and substituted its own referendum, asking residents whether the republic’s independence should be restored on the same basis as it was when the czarist empire collapsed with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

“The voters in Georgia have never turned out in such force in all our history,” said Archil Chirakadze, chairman of the election commission. “There can be no doubt what their will is, and there is no way that Gorbachev can ignore it.”

Georgia declared independence in May, 1918, six months after the Bolshevik Revolution. But the young state was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union three years later when the Red Army marched in to help local Bolsheviks overthrow the elected government of Social Democrats.

With a population of more than 5.2 million, Georgia is nearly 70% native Georgian. The largest minorities are Armenians (9%), Russians (7%) and Azerbaijanis (5%). Ossetians constitute only 3% and Abkhazians, another restive group, less than 2%.

GEORGIA FACTS

The Georgian Republic, which joined the Soviet Union in 1922, has an area of 25,000 square miles and a population of more than 5.2 million. Its capital is Tbilisi; its population is 68.8% Georgian, 9% Armenian, 7.4% Russian and a scattering of others. Its chief products include wheat, sugar beets, barley, tea, citrus fruits and livestock; it also manufactures textiles, chemicals and steel products and produces hydroelectric power.