Old Habits Die Hard for Kremlin Propagandists : Russia: Moscow’s heavy-handed bid to control information about Chechnya has the media fighting back.

What? Russian pilots bombing civilians? No, no, the Russian government press center declared in a huff. The explosions in Grozny, the capital of breakaway Chechnya, were deliberately set off by Chechen militants to make it look as if Russians were bombing the city.

A hundred thousand people lining the roads of Chechnya to call for peace and independence? Certainly not, the far-fetched official version went--those people were refugees fleeing to safer ground.

And have you heard, a Russian official asked, about those nasty criminals arrested on the Chechen border with Azerbaijan? Oops, never mind. The government spokesman slipped. Chechnya has no border with Azerbaijan. . . .

Amid Russia’s reluctant generals, green troops and myopic bomber pilots, no weapon has seemed blunter or more misused in the two-week Russian incursion into Chechnya than the once-vaunted art of propaganda. Moscow’s victory over the outgunned Chechens looks inevitable, but the Kremlin has already lost the information war. And the Russian media, bucking open government pressure, have seen perhaps their finest hour since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“I haven’t heard a greater flood of lies since the Afghanistan war or the 1991 August coup,” said Pavel Gutiontov, secretary of the Russian Journalists Union. “At the same time, the Russian press, with a few exceptions, is behaving with great dignity.”

Television, in particular, has faced the greatest pressure to toe the government line and yet has done the most to bring the realities of the Chechnya intervention home to the Russian public.

Like Americans at home during the Vietnam War, Russians for the first time are seeing their military wage war virtually as it happens on their television screens.

They see scenes like this: A young Russian woman stands in a bombed-out street of Grozny weeping openly into the camera and holding her two traumatized children by the hands. “I don’t know who to turn to,” she says amid sobs, “but please show that they are destroying residential neighborhoods. . . . I beg you, record this, the houses are all gone! I don’t know who can stop this. But this must be stopped!”

Most hard-hitting among television accounts have been those of the Independent Television Network, or NTV. Owned by the Most financial group and known as Russia’s most freewheeling television, NTV so angered officials with its Chechnya coverage that they threatened to revoke its license. They also directed veiled threats at other media outlets.

“Having failed to capture Grozny on the move, the authorities changed the direction of their main strike,” complained Yuri Bogomolov in the weekly Moscow News. “They launched an attack against the media, both directly and indirectly. Journalists were fired on in the area of hostilities. At press conferences and briefings, they were severely reprimanded.”

The Russian Journalists Union recorded more than a dozen incidents in which reporters covering the conflict were shot at or strafed by Russian troops, though without serious injury. The complaints were all directed against Russian troops, not Chechen irregulars.

Russian media coverage has been, inevitably, anti-war. Descriptions of the suffering of civilians and wounded soldiers dominate reports. Even for those so inclined, there has not been an opportunity to portray the heroism of the Russian troops, as virtually no access has been provided to the Russian lines.

Unlike the way American officials handled the media in the Persian Gulf War, there have been no Russian press pools, no daily briefings by commanders; in fact, it has not been quite clear who is running the Chechnya offensive.

Russian government efforts to block media coverage included demands that all members of the press leave Grozny before the bombing began last week and a reported--and unsuccessful--attempt to jam frequencies that Western journalists in Grozny were using to send information and pictures via satellite.

The city of Mozdok, the springboard for the incursion, was basically off-limits, and the few Russian reporters allowed there were more or less confined to barracks, they wrote.

Although Russian spokesmen did not want to provide information themselves, they bridled when reports tilted toward the more accommodating Chechens.

Alexander Kulikov, Russian deputy interior minister, went so far as to claim at a news conference that Chechen President Dzhokar M. Dudayev was only allowing pro-Chechen journalists into Grozny.

When several reporters rejected the claim as absurd--there were no checks of journalists entering Grozny--Kulikov maintained: “This is my personal opinion. But there have been no unbiased, open-minded reports.”

The Kremlin’s distress over anti-war reports in the Russian press was understandable. The media coverage was apparently having a marked effect on public opinion. A Moscow News poll found that the 58% of respondents who opposed the use of force in Chechnya on Dec. 6 had swelled to 70% a week later.

Valentin Sergeyev, the veteran government spin-controller who took over press management of the Chechnya crisis after an earlier spokesman was fired, complained that the media had become “Dudayev’s megaphone.” He said Chechen fighters who reportedly condemned him to death at a protest meeting in Grozny had all his family’s phone numbers--and he was sure they got them from Moscow journalists.

Gutiontov of the Russian Journalists Union ridiculed the claim that Russian reporters were pro-Dudayev, noting that none praised him personally or his policies. Instead, he said, they told the truth about what was happening in Chechnya.

“People who give orders to bomb their own citizens’ homes have no moral right to accuse the press of anything,” he said. “They want objectivity, they say. Well, they are getting a lot of it. The problem is that they don’t like it. But that’s their problem.”