Izvestia Staff Protests Plan to Transfer Senior Editor

MOSCOW â€”  Struggling to preserve the independence won under glasnost , the staff of the Soviet newspaper most respected for its professionalism rebelled on Wednesday against a move to send its reform-minded senior editor away to a foreign bureau.

Journalists from Izvestia, the daily newspaper owned by the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, appealed to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and other leaders to halt a campaign to transfer Igor N. Golembiovsky, currently the paper’s first deputy editor, to Spain as a foreign correspondent.

At an emotional staff meeting Wednesday, nearly 200 Izvestia staffers voted unanimously to demand that Golembiovsky remain in his post and threatened to take other legal measures if their request is not granted.

“That is a pretty way of saying we’ll go on strike,� Yuri I. Makarov, one of Izvestia’s section editors, said. “We connect all the success of the newspaper over the last years--the perestroika years--with him.�

The journalists see their struggle to keep Golembiovsky as a measure of the freedoms won under Gorbachev. Before Gorbachev came to power nearly six years ago, the Soviet news media was strictly censored, and freedom of speech was barely a theoretical concept.

“This will be a test,� Izvestia’s national news editor Andrei V. Illesh said. “This will be a test of free speech here.�

The struggle moreover will measure the relative political strength of conservatives, now apparently on the ascendancy, and liberals, whose fortunes have declined as Gorbachev has moved to the right in recent months.

After the recent violent clashes between Soviet troops and Lithuanians, Golembiovsky joined 29 other prominent Soviet intellectuals, including Izvestia’s leading political commentator Alexander I. Bovin, in signing an open letter in the avant-garde Moscow News weekly accusing Gorbachev of running a criminal regime.

That brought a call from Gorbachev to suspend the country’s seven-month-old press law and for the country’s parliament to assume control of the news media to ensure its objectivity in reporting current affairs, but the legislators refused.

The presidium of the Supreme Soviet had decided Wednesday to remove Golembiovsky, according to liberal staff members, but when news of the uproar at Izvestia reached the Kremlin the presidium members postponed any action until Feb. 7.

“Naturally, I do not want to leave,� Golembiovsky said following the staff meeting. “But the question of my job does not bother me. What really concerns me now are the problems we have at the newspaper.�

Golembiovsky, who has spent 30 years at Izvestia, was chosen by the paper’s staff last May as its candidate for editor-in-chief, but the presidium of the Supreme Soviet instead appointed Nikolai I. Yefimov, a former first deputy editor at Izvestia but also a onetime Communist Party official, to the post and made Golembiovsky his principal deputy.

Illesh charged that Yefimov increasingly removes from the newspaper articles that do not coincide with the views of the Communist Party. Yefimov could not be reached for comment.

Several stories about the brutal attack by Soviet troops on civilians at the Lithuanian television broadcast center on Jan. 13 in which 14 people died were pulled out by Yefimov after they had already been laid out in the newspaper, Illesh said.

The newspaper’s presses were already running 10 days ago, staff members said, when Yefimov pulled a story he apparently considered too critical about an anti-Gorbachev rally of more than 100,000 people outside the Kremlin wall. Thousands of copies printed in the first half hour were then destroyed.