New Foreign Minister Is an Old Hand at Challenging System : Soviet Union: Pankin began as brash journalist, then was ‘exiled.’ Now he has top diplomatic post.

Boris N. Pankin, the new Soviet foreign minister, has seen the world turn full circle.

As a brash Soviet journalist in his 40s, with a penchant for stories about police brutality, pollution and the number of abortions Soviet women must have because of the shortage of contraceptives, he fell afoul of the hard-line leadership group surrounding the late Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev.

For his pains, he was first threatened by the KGB, then, in 1982, “exiled” to a diplomatic post as ambassador to Sweden, a common tactic used at the time by Soviet officials wanting to rid themselves of troublemakers whose connections within the Communist system immunized them against the state’s more brutal forms of repression.

Now, two decades later, with the hard-liners in full retreat, Pankin, who more recently served as Soviet ambassador to Czechoslovakia, has emerged as the leader of the bureaucracy he once served.

Pankin’s moment of truth came early in the morning of Aug. 21--the third night of the coup. As rumors swept Moscow that Soviet troops might be ordered to storm the Russian Federation Parliament building, Pankin and his deputy issued a statement to the Czechoslovak news agency denouncing the takeover in Moscow. He was alone among Soviet diplomats, most of whom carefully avoided any public statements until they could see clearly which side was going to win, and his action has now been richly rewarded by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

With his liberal credentials well intact, Pankin is expected by Western analysts to try to follow the diplomatic line first established by former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze. In an interview Thursday in Izvestia, Pankin said that he had discussed the post with Shevardnadze before agreeing to take the job.

But there is considerable question about whether Pankin will be able to wield the kind of influence once exercised by Shevardnadze, who became a major figure in shaping the post-Cold War world. With the Soviet Union in turmoil and the central government’s authority rapidly diminishing, Pankin may be little more than a transitional figure, analysts say.

Unfamiliar to most officials in Washington, Pankin nevertheless is well known among the liberal intelligentsia of Moscow, many elements of which looked upon the newspaper he once edited, Komsomolskaya Pravda, as the most interesting publication in the country, one that routinely published writers who were deemed unpublishable by more conservative periodicals.

Pankin, now 60, began work at Komsomolka, as the newspaper of the Communist Youth League is familiarly known, during the beginning of the political, literary and journalistic “thaw” under Nikita S. Khrushchev in the early 1950s. At the same time, he was active in the youth league’s political affairs at Moscow State University, a setting that also served as the training ground for the man who has now tapped Pankin for the Foreign Ministry job--President Gorbachev.

By 1965, Pankin had become the paper’s editor and was pioneering investigative journalism in the Soviet press while, at the same time, making contacts with men who have since emerged as senior members of Gorbachev’s circle. Vitaly N. Ignatenko, Gorbachev’s press secretary and the new director of the Soviet news agency Tass, worked with Pankin, as did Igor Golembiovsky, the new editor of Izvestia.

But as the Khrushchev thaw gave way to what Soviet citizens now refer to as Brezhnev’s “era of stagnation,” Pankin and his paper quickly irritated the Kremlin’s leaders.

Pankin’s job repeatedly was saved by Alexander N. Yakovlev, then working at the Communist Party’s Central Committee headquarters, and now one of the architects of glasnost and perestroika. By 1973, however, Pankin was finally forced out and eased into a job heading the Soviet copyright agency, which sells Soviet books abroad, pays royalties to authors and makes sure the government receives a healthy slice of the profits.

Even his presence in that post, however, proved unacceptable to party hard-liners, and after nine years there, Pankin was fortuitously thrust into the Soviet foreign service, whose leader he will now be.

Lauter reported from Washington and Parks reported from Moscow.