Pravda Racked by Decline, Dissension : Soviet Union: Subscriptions are plummeting at the Communist Party’s leading paper. And the staff is rejecting the editor.

Pravda, that unequaled purveyor of the Communist Party line and longtime flagship of the Soviet press, is in a panic these days, its editor-in-chief said Wednesday.

Subscriptions are falling off by the millions, the staff is pushing out Editor-in-Chief Ivan T. Frolov, and Frolov, complaining of slander and back-stabbing, told reporters he will be only too happy to go.

The ruckus at the Soviet Union’s oldest daily newspaper has reached the point that the Communist Party’s policy-setting Central Committee decided this week to ask the Politburo to straighten out the matter, and Frolov, although denouncing “those who air their dirty linen,” decided to go public with his complaints.

“I have been persecuted,” said Frolov, a philosopher by profession and a close adviser to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Pravda’s troubles come amid scrambling and anxiety in much of the Soviet press as it tries to adjust to new freedoms and tougher competition for readers, now that prices for all publications have more than doubled. The annual subscription campaign ends this month, and initial reports show readership falling off almost across the board.

But few publications appear to have as gloomy an outlook as Pravda.

“A panicked mood arose over the subscriptions,” Frolov said, and he heard some staff members asking, “Will there be a Pravda in 1991?”

Pravda, which once boasted a circulation of 11 million, has lost 3 million readers this year. No figures are available for next year’s subscriptions, but Vladislav Yegorov, an official on Pravda’s Communist Party committee, said that in a “typical Russian city,” where 9,000 people now subscribe, only 240 had renewed.

Asked to explain the decline, Frolov said, “The most essential reason is the loss of prestige of the party.”

But some staff members point the finger at Frolov himself. Yegorov said the controversy over the editor-in-chief heated up last week when members of the newspaper’s party committee proposed, in diplomatic terms, that he resign.

Pravda reporters complain that Frolov is disrespectful to them and that under his guidance the newspaper is failing to meet Soviet journalism’s new standards for tough reporting and fresh writing.

There was a time when the editor-in-chief of the official newspaper of the party’s Central Committee would have been so clearly an inhabitant of the Communist Olympus that such an attack from below would have been unthinkable.

But in these days of democratization, Yegorov felt free to tell reporters in a Pravda corridor that it had been a mistake for Gorbachev to hire a non-professional.

The party “has a habit of appointing bathhouse directors as conductors of the philharmonic,” he said.

Frolov, for his part, complained that all his life he has clashed with party committees like Yegorov’s that want to tell him what to do, and that he had hoped to see the end of them in his old age.

“This is a cross I’ve carried all my life,” he said with an angry tone that contrasted with his usual droning, academic manner. “Now that I’m a member of the Politburo, I’m still carrying it.”

Frolov, 61, took over at Pravda a year ago, replacing the more conservative Victor G. Afanasyev amid predictions that, as a Gorbachev man, he would make the stodgy paper into a showcase for reform.

Frolov told reporters he soon found that Pravda’s potential was limited by its personnel. As the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky put it, he said, “You can’t play a nocturne on a drainpipe.”

He said that when the party committee meeting attacked him, he said, “I can’t--I don’t want to work at this newspaper,” but when he applied to the Central Committee to be relieved, he was told to go on working.

Yegorov said it was not clear who might replace Frolov, and other staff members said that Gorbachev appeared to fear that, without his ally heading Pravda, hard-line Communists might lay claim to the job and turn the newspaper into a conservative mouthpiece.

Pravda modernized its appearance under Frolov, although it retained its slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” And it began carrying advertising and experimenting with color. It also revived a “discussion club” featuring opposing views.

But its style remained wooden, and it tended to fill its pages with the texts of long speeches by party leaders, government announcements and obscure theoretical debates.

Frolov promised that so long as he remains at Pravda, he will fight for its independence, avoid sensationalism and watch over ideology to prevent it from turning into “Anti-Communist Pravda.”

He assured reporters that the newspaper, which has survived much since it was founded by V. I. Lenin in 1912, is not finished.

“Pravda was, is, and will be,” he said.

BACKGROUND

Pravda, whose name means “truth,” listed Josef Stalin among its staff when it was first published in 1912 as a Bolshevik organ in St. Petersburg, now Leningrad. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, it became the leading newspaper in the Soviet Union. The organ of the Communist Party Central Committee, it is printed in dozens of cities. Its role was to cover and interpret news in accordance with official policy. Soviet citizens and foreign observers long have watched it for shifts in policy.