Editors Fear Free Market Will Do Them In : Media: Russia says newspapers will have to live without government subsidies. The papers say increased costs will threaten their survival.

The Russian government has told editors of the country’s largest newspapers that they too will have to adjust to the free-market economy as of Jan. 2. The same editors who for years extolled the virtues of free enterprise now claim that Russia’s leadership is going too far and too fast by applying the rules of the free market to them.

Government subsidies on everything--including newsprint, office rents, printing costs--are scheduled to stop after Jan. 2, Russian officials say.

Editors of some of the nation’s largest newspapers say their publications cannot afford the new prices and that the very existence of a free press is threatened. Total publishing costs are expected to increase almost fourfold.

“This is impossible, this is the end of all the national publications,” fumed Pavel S. Gutiontov, chairman of the Committee for Free Press and Journalists’ Rights, an organization that recently replaced the national Union of Journalists.

Until Gorbachev’s reforms took hold, there was no free press in the country; the Communist Party controlled all printing presses and newsprint, and the government had censors working at every editorial office.

Released from these fetters and relying on heavy subsidies, the print media boosted circulations to mind-boggling figures. These big newspapers will suffer most under a market economy. Advertising, unlike in America, still is not a major source of income for most Russian newspapers.

The editors complained at a news conference that the price increases they face do not mark a movement to a market-based system because the state still exercises a monopoly over publishing and distribution of newspapers, as it does over many other vital spheres of the economy.

“This is not a genuine market,” said Eduard Sagalayev, chairman of the Moscow Union of Journalists. “When we have no alternative services to turn to, this cannot be called a market.”

Komsomolskaya Pravda, with a daily circulation of 18 million, is expected to lose 960 million rubles in 1992, about $10 million at the current tourist exchange rate, according to a report on the state of various newspapers made by Gutiontov at the news conference. To offset such a loss, it would have to charge 8 rubles a copy at a moment when even the current price of 2 rubles is considered too high by many. “When we charge 8 rubles for a single issue, no one will pay it,” he said. “This will be the end of the press.”

What especially infuriates editors is the government’s intention to keep subsidizing recently founded “official newspapers,” all of which enjoy unwarranted benefits, according to editors of independent newspapers present at the news conference.

“We view the plan as aimed at splitting the body of the democratic press into two feuding factions,” Gutiontov said. “The Russian leadership hardly needs yet another source of tension, and this time it will be among the very forces that played such an important role in its coming to power.”

The editors are so angry that in addition to traditional forms of protest--petitioning the authorities and staging strikes--they plan to try a financial assault on state coffers.

“If these plans are not revoked,” Gutiontov declared, “we will call our readers, millions of them, to inundate the Russian government with postage-due letters of protest. That will rob it of all the profits it hopes to extort from us, and more.”

Grebenshikov is a reporter in The Times’ Moscow Bureau.