Media : Liberal Soviet Daily Gets Pressure From the Right : Komsomolskaya Pravda, with its 18-million circulation, has resisted pressure to curb its call for broader freedoms under <i> perestroika.</i>

For Soviet liberals, these are difficult times. After nearly six years of world-changing reforms, the Soviet Union seems to be halting, retreating even, in the face of what it must do next to emerge from its profound crisis.

Troops have been ordered to patrol the streets of the country’s cities. Food and consumer goods increasingly must be rationed as the Soviet economy disintegrates. And ethnic hot spots flare one after another, with a continuing loss of life.

Conservatives, with a self-righteous “we told you so,” are resurgent, recruiting widely from the Communist Party’s hard-liners, the government bureaucracy, the security forces and the military. A creeping right-wing coup d’etat already seems to be under way against the reformers who had come to power here.

“People get up each morning and wonder in some fear and trepidation: ‘What next--where is the country heading, what new tragedy has befallen us?’ Whether there is any hope,” Vladislav A. Fronin, the editor-in-chief of Komsomolskaya Pravda, said. “We try to answer all those questions as honestly and as frankly as we can.”

Despite the swing to the right and the mounting pressures it has imposed on the country’s liberal press, Komsomolskaya Pravda still follows what Fronin described as a “radical leftist line,” arguing that the reforms begun under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1985 need to be “broadened, accelerated, strengthened, deepened” if perestroika is to succeed.

With a circulation of more than 18 million, Komsomolskaya Pravda is one of the Soviet Union’s two largest daily newspapers. It has nearly six times the readership of Pravda, the main Communist Party paper, and enjoys a following that is rapidly outgrowing the 30-year-olds who once formed its audience.

“We were born as an official organ of the central committee of a Communist organization, the Communist Youth League, but we have changed a great deal in the last couple of years,” said Fronin, 39, the paper’s top editor since late 1988.

“We are fully in the marketplace and determined to compete--journalistically, politically, ideologically, commercially. We don’t want to put out a nice paper that nobody reads nor a paper that millions might read but that really says nothing. We want readers to buy us because we have something to tell them, something to say.”

Komsomolskaya Pravda was the first Soviet daily to break with old, conservative journalistic formulas to become a feisty, carefree and democratic gadfly.

It abandoned platitudinous half-page articles, often published days after the events, in favor of shorter, newsier stories filed on deadline and written in Western style, with the essence first and the background following. It pepped up its headlines, and it has begun experimenting with its overall layout to make it livelier. It also redefined its audience, appealing across the whole age range and competing with the major national newspapers.

But the main shift was its approach to the news, especially political news. The “party line,” historically laid down by Communist Party headquarters, distributed through the official news agency Tass, and enforced by party discipline, is often ignored or even turned into a target for the paper’s journalists.

When the government announced that troops would be deployed to maintain order in the country’s cities, the country’s conservative and centrist press duly published articles on the need for such a measure to curb crime. But Komsomolskaya Pravda went on the attack against a development that it saw as an undeclared martial law, devoting its whole front page to the issue one day last week.

“These patrols are elements of a state of emergency, but no state of emergency has been declared or, as far as we can see, is warranted,” Fronin said. “Thus, there are serious constitutional and legal questions, as well as political ones, about the order . . . .

“But we also wanted people to understand the overall context. With major price increases in food and consumer goods expected any day, with some right-wing elements just waiting for an excuse for real martial law, we thought we needed to warn people not to allow themselves to be provoked. Any kind of clash, not planned or even foreseen, could instantly bring about events that will change the lives of us all.”

In an editorial on the front page devoted to the new order, the paper urged: “Compatriots! Let’s keep cool and deny them the pretext to patrol us!”

When Soviet paratroopers violently seized the Lithuanian television broadcast center in Vilnius last month, resulting in the deaths of 14 people, Komsomolskaya Pravda ran some of the most-detailed and uncompromising accounts published by the Soviet press. Those accounts contradicted initial government claims that the soldiers were fired upon first while trying to protect members of a “Committee of National Salvation” who were attempting to halt “inflammatory broadcasts” by independence-minded Lithuanian nationalists.

“Our position is straightforward--we believe that the army should never participate in domestic political conflicts,” Fronin said. “When these ‘Committees of National Salvation’ began to appear and the army began to support them against elected governments, their actions were clearly against the constitution . . .

“In plain language, you could call it a coup d’etat, at least an attempted coup. And that is what we did. Today, we operate under no censorship, and we can speak out much more freely than we ever imagined. But this means that we have a professional responsibility to do so. And a coup is a coup.”

Komsomolskaya Pravda found evidence last autumn of what appeared to many to be much more than routine military maneuvers--sudden deployments of paratroopers by air and by road, unscheduled exercises around Moscow, the issuance of large amounts of live ammunition.

After the newspaper published a detailed story, the Soviet military went into a flurry of denials, explaining the troop movements as practice, a month in advance, for the annual Nov. 7 parade through Red Square in celebration of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. But Soviet liberals credit Komsolskaya Pravda with frustrating what they still see as some sort of political power play by the Soviet military.

“Komsomolskaya Pravda blew the whistle on our brass,” Vitaly Korotich, the editor of the equally avant-garde magazine Ogonyok, said at the time. “If they hadn’t been so alert, we might well be living under martial law now.”

Targets of recent exposes have also included the former director of a Soviet oil exporting company who bilked the state of more than $100 million and then escaped punishment as a war veteran, and the cartel that controls Moscow’s farmers’ markets and keeps meat prices high.

The paper has poked fun at the police chief in the Latvian capital of Riga who boasted of strengthened security after a number of bomb blasts but failed to detect a dummy land mine the paper’s correspondent left beneath his window, and it used the 29th anniversary of the miniskirt in the West to mock the lack of fashion in the Soviet clothing industry.

And some news can be found in virtually no other paper. Last week, only Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that a giant Moscow auto plant had gone on strike to protest the management’s refusal to place the enterprise under the Russian government--a politically daring move--and leave the jurisdiction of the central government’s ministries.

The paper has also developed the “political chuckle,” inviting readers to laugh at its opponents, savoring the ironies it finds in their positions and occasionally using open sarcasm to expose the hypocrisy it finds in official statements.

“Such a newspaper is not produced because its journalists want it this way,” Fronin argued. “We have met the test of the marketplace. While other national newspapers lost 50, 60, even 75% of their circulations when subscription prices were tripled this year, we more or less held steady and became the country’s largest daily.”

The paper now serves as a major forum for the country’s political debates. Stanislav S. Shatalin, a leading pro-market economist and Gorbachev adviser, used it last month for an open letter that declared his break with socialism and called upon the president to resign.

Within the last month it has also published criticism of present political trends here by Vadim V. Bakatin, dismissed as interior minister for refusing to accept the military patrols; Nikolai Y. Petrakov, another former Gorbachev adviser on economic reforms; Alexander N. Yakovlev, one of the original architects of perestroika now on the political sidelines, and Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the former foreign minister, who resigned warning about the growing danger of a dictatorship.

“This is serious criticism by serious men who were close to the president and who set out their points of view in a considered way,” Fronin said. “This is material that people need to form their own judgments, to take part in the politics of our time. Look, the future of our country and much of the world beyond is at stake. What other role should a newspaper play?”

Such a stand is taken only at a cost, however, and the pressures that the government can bring to bear on the Soviet media are tremendous.

The State Committee for Television and Radio canceled the country’s most popular television program, “Vzglyad,” after it twice tried to explore the reasons for Shevardnadze’s resignation. The program’s producers are now working out of Leningrad’s television center and airing their show, which had a nationwide audience estimated at 185 million, wherever they can get a time slot.

At the end of last week, the committee severely restricted the frequencies that the new and highly popular Radio Rossiya could use, effectively cutting its potential audience in half.Radio Rossiya was established two months ago by the Russian Federation, the country’s largest republic, to ensure a far hearing for its liberal policies and the views of Boris N. Yeltsin, its president. Gorbachev had complained, however, about its coverage of Lithuania.

A major battle is currently under way over efforts to remove the liberal first deputy editor of Izvestia, the government-owned daily paper that has developed a strong reputation in recent years for professionalism and objectivity.

In Lithuania and neighboring Latvia, the major newspaper plants have been seized by security forces in an attempt to silence the pro-independence press. In Lithuania, the republic’s television broadcast center is still in the hands of the anonymous “Committee of National Salvation” after its seizure by the army.

Journalists have also become the targets of gunmen. Two local newspaper editors have been shot and killed, apparently for political motives, recently. A television cameraman was killed by police commandos in Riga during a shootout last month.

Most worrying at Komsomolskaya Pravda, however, was Gorbachev’s call last month for the suspension of the country’s new press law, which freed the Soviet news media from decades of censorship and gave it an independent voice. Lawmakers rejected the proposal, but it was sent nonetheless to a parliamentary committee for study.

“If Gorbachev could find a way, he might well reimpose government controls on all the media,” Fronin said. “There is no mistaking the shift to the right now . . . and freedom of the press and freedom of speech could easily be judged as ‘somewhat premature’ for our situation.”

Paradoxically, the paper enjoys what Fronin called “a very warm working relationship” with both Gorbachev’s office and Communist Party headquarters, where there are well-placed Komsomolskaya Pravda alumni, including Vitaly N. Ignatenko, the president’s press secretary, to act as a buffer.

Although Komsomolskaya Pravda won its editorial independence from the Communist Youth League under the new press law--its editor is elected by the paper’s staff, and he has full authority--it remains a part of the Pravda Publishing House, which effectively controls the paper’s production, circulation and finances. A percentage of its profits still go to the Youth League, or Komsomol.

As a result of a decision by the Soviet Communications Ministry, which controls distribution of most of the Soviet press, Komsomolskaya Pravda was cut back from six days of publication to five, losing its Sunday edition.

“We lost 15% of our potential revenue overnight, and now we are in danger of losing some readers because there is a big gap in our news coverage,” Fronin said. “We didn’t even have a say. Yet, Pravda and Izvestia, which are much, much smaller papers now, kept their weekend editions.”

Fronin is even more worried about losing journalists from his 343-member staff to the many new publications being established.

“Our salaries were frozen last March, and despite very large revenues we can’t pay our people more,” he said. “Our best reporters, our best writers will move to where they can get more money, I am afraid, and then we will lose our edge.”

But Fronin, who has worked at the paper for all but two years of his career, is not moving. Despite the old adage among Soviet newsmen that Komsomolskaya Pravda was a good place for a young journalist to make his name and then find a job at a more prestigious paper, Fronin intends to break the “40-and-out” rule.

“We have oxygen here, pure oxygen,” Fronin said. “A journalist must have the freedom to state his opinions, and we have that oxygen now. It’s quite heady, this oxygen, but once you begin to breathe it you (get) hooked on it.

“That’s how we are now, journalists and readers alike, absolutely hooked on this new freedom of the press. And if they turn it off, we’ll all suffocate.”

Times researcher Viktor K. Grebenshikov contributed to this story.