COLUMN ONE : Moscow’s Media War Heats Up : High-tech global networks, underground presses and greater journalistic courage make communications control a difficult task for the new Soviet leadership.

Perhaps the best signal of how difficult it may be for Communist Party hard-liners to roll back the reforms of perestroika and resume power in the Soviet Union came the first morning of their coup.

Among the first acts of the new Committee for the State of Emergency--after seizing control of government broadcasting facilities--was to hold a lengthy press conference.

It was a bow to the power of public opinion, inside and out the Soviet Union, that previous organizers of Kremlin coups had never felt obliged to make.

The next day, as Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin barricaded himself inside the Russian Parliament building, American television networks conducted live interviews with his supporters over open phone lines from inside the building. Meanwhile, a prominent Soviet journalist reporting to CBS anchorman Dan Rather was working on a documentary segment with Mike Wallace for “60 Minutes.”

The very technologies that George Orwell once feared would be the tool of totalitarian control have made the crackdown in the Soviet Union far more difficult to sustain.

The hard-liners must force “a return to a more centralized approach to communications,” if they are to survive in power, said Diana Lady Dougan, chairman of the International Communication Studies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

But it may not be completely possible. “There are a number of genies that are already out of the bottle,” Dougan said.

The state of emergency committee did crack down swiftly, and in sometimes untraditional ways.

Sometime Tuesday night, for instance, the government struck at the Soviet Union’s independent and underground news agencies by sending high-voltage jolts through the nation’s power lines. According to a Leningrad journalist who managed to contact outsiders monitoring events, the jolts fried their equipment.

The government also ordered the shutdown of all but nine government-run newspapers and all independent radio and television stations

But after five years of perestroika, many once compliant Soviet journalists refused to submit.

Workers at a state-run printing plant here, for example, went on strike Monday after the editorial board of the government daily Izvestia refused to publish Yeltsin’s appeal to resist the coup.

And when the hard-liners banned broadcasts by reformist radio and television Tuesday, the Union of Soviet Journalists faxed a strong anti-coup appeal to journalists asking them to “report only the truth.”

Ekho Moskva radio, the voice of Yeltsin’s Russian government, went back on the air for several hours Tuesday after being shut down Monday morning. Journalists set up a makeshift transmitter inside the Russian Parliament building.

Some independent publications continued printing over fax machines, photocopiers and computers--creating makeshift newspapers and launching a poster campaign in Moscow’s subway stations.

“We have no other access to trustworthy information,” Yura, a 30-year-old mathematician, said as he read from one of the sheets posted in the subway. “This is the only way to find out the truth about the military coup under way in our city.”

In Leningrad, three pro-reform newspapers and a Communist Party newspaper--none with junta authorization to be published--appeared anyway on Tuesday. Two of them, Smena and Nevskoe Vremya, ran the full texts of statements from Yeltsin and Leningrad’s reformist mayor, Anatoly A. Sobchak, who condemned the coup.

And “Independent City,” a resistence radio station in Leningrad, was still on the air Tuesday, as was Leningrad’s radical-dominated television channel.

Even official television controlled by the ruling committee seemed to suggest at least a wavering recognition that the Soviet people now required a more credible media.

A newscast Tuesday afternoon, which experts monitoring here said appeared to be clearly approved from above, broadcast all of Yeltsin’s demands, said that 70% of local governments supported Yeltsin rather than the new leadership, talked about miners going on strike and quoted in a straight and explicit way President Bush’s sharp criticism of the coup.

Later, the evening newscast carried none of this. And the night before, the broadcast seemed almost schizophrenic, veering from tightly restricted to rather open.

The new ruling committee also seems newly sensitive to the outside world. So far, it has imposed no restrictions at all on Western journalists.

“They are letting us get out everything we want to get out so far,” said Eason Jordan, the foreign editor of Cable News Network. CNN is even feeding over a Soviet satellite. “They could pull the switch at any moment, but so for they haven’t.”

“I think there is an underground system in place, and the information flow will continue” even if the government shuts down official channels, Jordan said. His own network, he said, already has a contingency plan in place to broadcast from the Soviet Union if the government shuts them down.

There now appears to be a limit to how much the Soviets can control communications technology.

The government, for instance, may have a relatively easy time controlling the television and phone systems, particularly those that use satellites, said Ellen Mickiewicz, director of the Soviet Media and International Communications Program at the Carter Center at Emory University in Atlanta.

The government already had cracked down on some programming over the last year and a half. On occasion, programs that became controversial were simply blacked out for several minutes.

They can probably also control Moscow-based newspapers, which are licensed and printed by government printing plants, Mickiewicz said.

But the fast-growing desk-top publishing industry in the Soviet Union, which generates pamphlets and newsletters that may be delivered and duplicated via computer--will be far harder to control.

The academic community with access to computers has “long been able to ignore the usual restrictions,” Dougan said.

Fax machines are also difficult to monitor, in part because they are easy to move, though the United States Information Agency reports that fax machines and computers are all registered with the Soviet phone company.

On Tuesday, for instance, the fax machines in foreign newspaper bureaus whirred as independent news sources such as the pro-Yeltsin Russian Information Agency, now working in virtual underground conditions, labored to get another version of events out to the world.

“We are cut off from printing plants, microphones and the airwaves,” Vitaly Tretyakov, editor-in-chief of Nezavismaya Gazeta (Independent Newspaper) declared in a faxed message addressed to “free journalists” all over the world, asking for their help.

“As soon as honest Soviet journalists fall silent, perestroika will be through,” Tretyakov said.

Deprived--supposedly only “temporarily”--from their Moscow printing facilities by the emergency committee’s order, the editors and correspondents of Nezavismaya Gazeta, “fulfilling their journalistic duty,” set about preparing a faxable edition.

There is also a crude form of cable television in the Soviet Union, really no more than master antenna systems that wire one or more apartment buildings. Dougan said one study estimates there are 3,000 such cable systems in the country now, some of which already produce their own tapes for the closed-circuit systems.

Such efforts are made easier by the use of small video cameras, most often seen in the hands of tourists. Within hours of the events occurring Tuesday, for instance, CNN was showing an amateur video shot by a German citizen of pro-Yeltsin demonstrators setting a government tank on fire. Such amateur videos, which are becoming more common among Soviet citizens, became the backbone of a videocassette underground used by Solidarity during the years of martial law in Poland.

The local cable systems also could show news pulled from other countries, perhaps videotaped off the air from border regions of the country. In Armenia, Soviet citizens can watch Turkish television; in Estonia, they can watch Finnish TV, and in Lithuania, they can watch Polish broadcasts.

Videocassette players, while expensive, are also increasingly plentiful. As early as 1988, Izvestia talked about “the currently fashionable passion for videotapes.”

Reliable numbers are difficult to come by, but in many government offices, and in a surprising number of homes, there are also small satellite dishes to watch international media, including CNN, said Bob Schmidt, president of the Cable Assn. of America and also president of a company setting up a wireless cable television system in the Soviet Union.

Some number of these satellite dishes are thought to be homemade.

Dougan noted one estimate that says there were 30,000 satellite dishes in Czechoslovakia in 1990, 15,000 of which were homemade.

To some degree, perestroika accelerated all this to the point that it would be difficult to reverse.

Schmidt, for instance, brought a new copying machine to the Soviet Union this month, something that would have been impossible two years ago. But now, many visitors come off planes laden with electronic gear.

“It used to be they would go through your luggage and seize Time magazine to keep out Western media,” Schmidt said. “In the last few years, I have been there 23 times, and I have gotten to know these people, and they will wave me through the border without even looking at my bags.”

Then there is also international shortwave radio.

The United States Information Agency estimates that 25 million to 30 million Soviet citizens listen to the Voice of America at least once a week in normal times, and a somewhat smaller number listen to Radio Liberty, the U.S. government broadcast service aimed specifically at the Soviet Union. History suggests that number increases dramatically during crises. The audience of the British Broadcasting Corp. may be larger.

Since the crisis began, the radio services have abandoned most of their entertainment programming and started covering the coup full time with interviews with people from all the factions. They even have reporters in the Russian Parliament building with Yeltsin and his supporters.

The coup leaders have so far not tried to resume the jamming that blocked Radio Liberty for nearly four decades before ousted Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev turned off the jammers 2 1/2 years ago.

Why hasn’t jamming begun?

“I don’t know,” said Enders Wimbush, director of the Munich, Germany-based Radio Liberty. “This is a strange coup--an inept but serious coup. They are trying to stop the disintegration of the country but still want to give the impression to the West of being civilized.”

It is also possible that jamming will begin later, if violence erupts. Blanket jamming is technically complicated and may not be easy to restart, Wimbush says.

And there is one other explanation that reveals a small truth about trying to control a population in the Information Age.

“The coup leaders may need us because they have no other source of information,” Wimbush said. Most of these officials have been on these broadcasts and have come to rely on them to hear their colleagues and to learn about the West.

The government newspapers haven’t yet filled that gap.

Pravda, the Communist Party’s most important daily newspaper, hit the streets Tuesday with a front page carrying all the news that the new Soviet leadership now deems fit to print. Beneath the proletarian motto “Workers of the World, Unite!” and V. I. Lenin’s sharp-chinned profile, the page was a gray mass of statements, addresses and resolutions issued by the men who deposed Gorbachev.

On Monday, Pravda evidently had been in the dark about the events shaking the Soviet Union and the world. The only Moscow-based national daily to print on Monday morning, it featured a front-page message of greetings from Gorbachev to a symposium on energy, ecology and the economy, something that wouldn’t have made it into print if the editors had been warned in advance of what was coming.

Rosenstiel reported from Washington and Shogren from Moscow. Staff writer Tyler Marshall in Berlin also contributed to this story.