MEDIA / A BREATH OF FREEDOM : The Squeeze on Soviet Newscasters Eases : Anchorman recalls being trapped between squabbling ideologues. But a new decree frees broadcasters from party dictates.

Palms sweating, black brows twitching, fingers clamped on a harsh Belomor cigarette, Vladimir Molchanov mumbled through the material he would read aloud, within minutes, for 150 million viewers of “Vremya,” the nightly news program.

He fiddled with his tie, put on his jacket, listened to frantic commands and questions thrown out by the staff, ran a comb through his silver-streaked hair, and emerged, poised and authoritative, on the flickering screen: Soviet television’s premier gentleman.

Molchanov, best known as the soft-spoken host of the hit late-night show “Before and After Midnight,” was doing his weekly stint as anchorman on “Vremya.” He dislikes it, but it has been worse.

Two years ago, he recalled, the frenzied minutes before “Vremya” went on the air were made nightmarish by an ideological tug of war between two Communist Party chieftains, the liberal Alexander N. Yakovlev and the conservative Yegor K. Ligachev.

“You’ve seen how we go on the air,” Molchanov said in a post-show interview. “Nothing’s ready, and you don’t know what you’re going to read.

“And Ligachev would call at 5 minutes to 9, and he’d say, ‘You have to say this and that.’ And the program director would say, ‘Thank you.’ But then, two minutes later, with three minutes left until air time, Yakovlev would call and say, ‘You have to say this,’ and it would be completely different.

“It was terrible. They played their games, and we were stuck in the middle. Thank God, there’s none of that anymore.”

Early this week, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev decreed that television and radio are to be free of party dictates. His decree was hailed in the West as a landmark of freedom for broadcast journalists long under the thumb of state and party control. But Molchanov, with the eyes of an insider, sees it differently. It has been months since he felt that he needed any defense from party pressure.

Molchanov was nearly fired last November for having on his show a newspaper editor who had incurred Gorbachev’s displeasure. In June, Molchanov talked on the air with KGB Maj. Gen. Oleg D. Kalugin, just four days before the former counterintelligence chief was stripped of his rank and honors by presidential order. But on this occasion, there was not a peep from Mikhail F. Nenashev, the chief of state television.

Like the hosts of other talk shows popular for controversy, Molchanov appears to have become untouchable. He is among “the people who do television, the people who get watched,” he says. “No decree today can do anything to us.”

Despite the new freedom he feels, Molchanov still uses a basket of tricks for “Before and After Midnight,” tricks he learned when control was strict.

He does live interviews when he can, to prevent any possibility of censorship. And he keeps his best material off the first of his two Saturday night broadcasts--the one that goes to the eastern Soviet Union--so that he can be sure it will be on his later Moscow broadcast.

Molchanov pioneered Soviet late-night television, and he was one of the first to go on the air live. Yet, he seems an unlikely television star.

The son of a well-known composer and actress mother, Molchanov grew up among Moscow’s intellectual elite and spent years in the Netherlands as a correspondent for Novosti, the Soviet news agency.

He has none of the brashness common to television figures. The Moscow News calls him “reticent, calm, intelligent, laconic and polite.”

Molchanov, 39, does not seem to care much about money. He gets about 1,500 rubles a month, or $2,500 at the official exchange rate. That’s seven times the average salary here.

He has a late-model car, an apartment in the coveted center of Moscow, where he lives with his wife and daughter, and a country place under construction. Still, he says, he has trouble finding things to buy, partly because of the shortage-plagued economy and partly because of a traditional, highbrow Russian aversion to getting and spending.

“I get richer and richer, and just don’t need it,” he said, with something between dismay and boredom in his soft tenor voice.