Lawmakers in Russia Seek to Tame Izvestia : Press: But reporters and editors defy ‘illegal’ law subordinating independent newspaper to Parliament.

Defying President Boris N. Yeltsin’s guarantee that he will defend the freedom of the press, Russian lawmakers passed a law Friday that makes the country’s most prestigious independent newspaper, Izvestia, subordinate to them.

Editors and reporters at Izvestia, however, declared that they will not give in to the “illegal” law.

“We will not serve (Parliament Chairman Ruslan I.) Khasbulatov,” Nikolai D. Bodnaryuk, a deputy editor in chief of Izvestia, said in a telephone interview. “Our country’s journalists have become too democratic to serve any political authority--the Politburo or Khasbulatov.”

The newspaper’s defense strategy, Bodnaryuk said, will be to carry out business as usual: “Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow you will get the same, independent Izvestia that you got today.”

If the Parliament refuses to give up its claim on Izvestia, the editors said, then they will fight it out in court.

Russian journalists said the lawmakers’ attempt to take over Izvestia, which has a circulation of about 4 million, reflects their eagerness to discredit Yeltsin, who had put his reputation on the line in giving Izvestia a guarantee that it would not be touched.

“By striving to establish control over the free press, the majority in the Parliament was trying to get more power by elbowing the president out of the way,” Igor Malashenko, a political commentator on central television, said in a telephone interview. “They want to undermine the authority of the president.”

When the legislature’s designs on Izvestia were disclosed earlier this week, Yeltsin assured editors that he would protect the newspaper, which formerly belonged to the Parliament of the Soviet Union but became independent after the hard-line coup in Moscow last August.

“No one is permitted to exert pressure on the media--to destroy what has been built,” Yeltsin said Thursday at a meeting with heads of Russian newspapers, radio stations and television stations. “This is a time when democracy is struggling for its existence.”

Yeltsin assured news media executives that they would have his support as they struggled to turn Russia’s fledgling free press into an unbreakable institution.

While the legislators’ primary aim may have been to score a point on Yeltsin in the ongoing battle for power, Friday’s move also showed that many of Russia’s democratically elected lawmakers would prefer to have the country’s most powerful newspaper in their pocket.

The dispute is one example of how complicated it is for Russia to remake itself into a democratic country when there are many competing ideas about what needs to be discarded or retained from the Soviet system and about what the new state should resemble in the end.

During most of the Soviet era, the press and electronic media were tightly controlled by the Communist Party. Only stories that had been approved by the censors reached the people.

Now, even government-funded newspapers and television and radio programs cover the activities of the legislature critically. Lawmakers charge that they cannot get their word out to the people the way they want to.

Reporters at Izvestia said they will not return to the days when being a journalist meant being a mouthpiece for those in power, even if they have to quit their jobs.

“They want us to write about the problems of the legislature in the way that favors them,” said Sergei A. Mostovshchkov, one of Izvestia’s star reporters. “I will not work for such a newspaper, and my understanding is that the majority of Izvestia’s journalists will not work for it.”

Khasbulatov has frequently accused the media of biased coverage of the Supreme Soviet, the national legislature, and has threatened to “sort things out” with critical reporters.

This week he appeared to make good on his threat.

In addition to introducing the draft law changing Izvestia’s status from independent to subordinate to the legislature, he introduced another law that would create councils to oversee state-run television and radio.

News of these moves created a panic among the leaders of Russia’s fledgling liberal news media. The chief editors of two of the country’s most prestigious newspapers, the head of the Itar-Tass news service and the boss of state television and radio published an emotional appeal to Yeltsin. They charged that lawmakers were trying to put greater restrictions on them than the Communist Party bosses did in their heyday.

“The drafts . . . will leave the press, television and radio on a tight rein unknown to journalists even during the days of the absolute power of the Soviet Communist Party,” said the appeal, published by Itar-Tass.

Malashenko said the attempted takeover of Izvestia by the legislature is just the beginning of a widespread attack on the news media.

“TV will follow Izvestia,” Malashenko said. “The legislature will attempt to pass a restrictive law on television and radio in the fall. I expect it. But we will resist.”

Andrei Ostroukh, a researcher in The Times’ Moscow Bureau, contributed to this report.