THE MEDIA : Tug of War Over Russian Newspaper : Battle for Izvestia’s real estate pits president against legislature.

A battle over the property of Izvestia, Russia’s most influential newspaper, has turned into a bitter tug of war between the country’s two most powerful political institutions--the president and the legislature.

In defiance of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, a legislator in charge of mass media has said that Izvestia has no right to its publishing house even if the president says it does.

At stake is one of the juiciest real estate empires in the country--eight huge buildings in downtown Moscow, a publishing house that prints several newspapers, an immense garage, a factory that makes components for prefabricated buildings, kindergartens, even several resorts on the Black Sea coast.

The legislature’s battle for the newspaper’s property, led by Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, is really a political battle waged against the newspaper. Khasbulatov seems to view Izvestia as the ringleader of what he has called the “unruly and vituperative mass media.”

If the legislature wins the property battle, it will succeed in destroying the publication, Izvestia’s economics editor, Mikhail L. Berger, said.

The newspaper will be left “naked in the street,” Berger said. “They would simply throttle us with huge bills for all services that we need to publish. In two or three months the saga would be over.”

Yeltsin first went to bat for the newspaper last month when the legislature, the Russian Supreme Soviet, passed a resolution providing for the takeover by the legislature of the Izvestia publishing house, which lawmakers claimed belongs to the Supreme Soviet as part of its inheritance from the legislature of the former Soviet Union.

To strengthen his defense of Izvestia, Yeltsin signed a decree last week authorizing full transfer of the property title of the publishing house and all the other property to the newspaper itself.

Nearly all observers regarded the fight as over, but to the surprise and consternation of the entire journalistic community in Moscow, the Supreme Soviet demonstrated that it has more nerve and ammunition than even Yeltsin expected.

In an overt challenge to the president’s authority and political standing, the Russian Federation Property Fund, subordinated to the legislature, coolly announced Monday that it was taking over the contested real estate “in implementation of the Supreme Soviet’s resolution of July 17.”

Vladimir P. Lisin, a deputy chairman of the legislature’s subcommittee on mass media, called a press conference on Wednesday to justify the move.

He contended that the current newspaper is different from the old Izvestia (The News), which was shut down by the leaders of the abortive hard-line coup d’etat last August. When Izvestia’s editors resumed publication, they decided to re-register as an independent, private newspaper.

They registered the new daily paper under the same name and listed Izvestia’s property as belonging to the editorial board.

The conflict is so complicated and the legislation governing it so murky that it may have to be solved by the country’s Constitutional Court.

The most recent maneuver occurred Thursday when the State Property Committee, an executive body headed by a Yeltsin ally, declared Izvestia’s printing plant a “state newspaper publishing complex” and, to safeguard the paper’s ability to print, named Editor in Chief Igor N. Golembiovsky as the new plant’s general director.