News Media Ussr

It was a close encounter of the Communist kind. Towering, tiny-headed humanoids from outer space landed in the Soviet city of Voronezh and emerged from their spacecraft for a promenade around the park, spreading fear among residents. At least that's what the official Tass news agency said Monday.

During a recent interview on the Soviet Union's early-morning news show, the grandson of a man who had fought against the Bolsheviks in the early years of Soviet power uttered a sentence that, for most of the previous 73 years, might have landed him and the show's producers in Siberia or worse. "Lenin was a murderer," the interview subject said. Without flinching, the host went on to his next question.

Glasnost notwithstanding, the Soviet Union isn't perceived as a mecca for crusading journalists. Still, Yuri Shchekochihin has inspired a new generation of ambitious muckrakers. Shchekochihin, 40, is an investigative writer who works for Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Gazette), a prestigious weekly newspaper based in Moscow. He was prowling the streets of Los Angeles recently, searching the city's underbelly for evidence of Soviet organized crime taking root here.

The week after the coup collapsed, Panorama, Southern California's Russian-language newspaper, quoted Lenin: "The revolution, the necessity of which the Bolsheviks have spoken of for so long, has been . . ." Then came the joke: Instead of sovershilos (accomplished), as the founder of the Soviet state boasted in 1917, the headline ended with the word zavershilos! (ended).

We hate to tell you this, Comrade Mukhortov, but those aliens you claim to have interviewed near Moscow probably weren't really from another planet. For Times readers who do not subscribe to Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Communist Party youth newspaper, Pavel Mukhortov was identified in Thursday's edition of the official Soviet publication as a reporter who had chatted with a few exotic aliens.

The government newspaper Izvestia became the first Soviet publication to register under a new press law guaranteeing freedom from decades of state censorship. More than 120 newspapers and other Soviet news organizations have applied for registration. Under the new law, to establish a publication or news organization, Soviets need only provide their name, address, frequency of publication, circulation figures and source of financing.

Soviet housewives, students, clerks and secretaries who lined up in unusually large numbers to buy their morning newspapers Thursday were in for a disappointment. Hoping to find the text of a draft Communist Party program detailing historic changes bound to affect their everyday lives dramatically, they instead got page after page of transcripts of party debate--but not the key document itself.

When Mikhail S. Gorbachev was ousted, so were some of the achievements that blossomed under perestroika. Among them: Union Treaty: Gorbachev was to officiate at the treaty's signing, scheduled to begin Tuesday. His treaty would have kept the federation together while granting greater autonomy to the republics. These republics were to be given greater powers in the national legislature, military matters, foreign affairs, natural resources and the administration of energy resources.

The 1.8 million readers of the arch-conservative daily Sovietskaya Rossiya opened their newspapers Wednesday to a gripping and detailed, if completely outlandish, version of how the war was going in the Persian Gulf: "Here are the latest reports from the front: Iraqi forces continue their fierce battles with the enemy," the paper said. It continued: "Iraqi fighters have courageously taken the first mighty blow, remained standing and in turn, units and detachments of the 3rd Corps under Gen.

A leading Soviet liberal weekly, the Literary Gazette, announced that its 75-year-old editor, Alexander B. Chakovsky, has retired and has been replaced by a senior Communist Party official. The new editor, Yuri P. Voronov, 59, had headed the Party Central Committee's Cultural Department--now being disbanded under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's political reforms--for the last three years. Literary sources said that Voronov has a reputation as a strong supporter of reforms.

It's a mind-blowing image: Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin standing by in the Kremlin, waiting for a football game to end so they can talk to ABC viewers Monday night about the Soviet upheaval. Actually, it will be early morning in Moscow, but the two leaders are set to be interviewed live by viewers in 11 U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, shortly after the game between the New York Giants and San Francisco 49ers. ABC can only cross its fingers that the game doesn't go into overtime.

Stationed in front of a computer screen in her Spanish-style bungalow from almost the moment news of the Soviet military coup broke, Arana J. Greenberg found herself in the eye of a hurricane sweeping a nation more than 10,000 miles away. As the sole U.S.

The Soviet Communist Party, accused of complicity in the conservative coup d'etat this week, came under strong attack across the nation Friday, and its 73-year hold on power appeared to be slipping fast. Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin ordered the suspension of all the party's activities in the Russian Federation, the country's largest republic, and halted the publication of its newspapers, including the party daily Pravda, on grounds that they had backed the putsch.

A Denver publisher that is the sole North American distributor of the independent Soviet news agency Interfax has been in the middle of the Soviet crisis, feeding news to the White House, newspapers and TV networks. "We were supposed to start (distributing Interfax) on Sept. 3, but we've been working straight since 9:15 p.m." on the first reports of the coup, said Pamela Lush, founder of DGL International Publishing.

Reviled by most of the world, its grip on the Soviet Union waning by the hour, the hard-line Kremlin junta that ousted President Mikhail S. Gorbachev collapsed Wednesday, and Gorbachev returned to Moscow, reassuring his people and the world that he is again in "full control." In a brief interview as he emerged from his plane here early today, Gorbachev said his captors had failed in an attempt to break him.

When Mikhail S. Gorbachev was ousted, so were some of the achievements that blossomed under perestroika. Among them: Union Treaty: Gorbachev was to officiate at the treaty's signing, scheduled to begin Tuesday. His treaty would have kept the federation together while granting greater autonomy to the republics. These republics were to be given greater powers in the national legislature, military matters, foreign affairs, natural resources and the administration of energy resources.

The Communist Party candidates defeated in the Soviet parliamentary elections last Sunday were advised Saturday by the party newspaper Pravda to take a critical look at themselves and to realize that the people are no longer willing to put up with government by bureaucracy.

Perhaps the best signal of how difficult it may be for Communist Party hard-liners to roll back the reforms of perestroika and resume power in the Soviet Union came the first morning of their coup. Among the first acts of the new Committee for the State of Emergency--after seizing control of government broadcasting facilities--was to hold a lengthy press conference.

Backed by fearsome military might, the chiefs of the Soviet army, KGB and police and fellow right-wingers on Monday sequestered Mikhail S. Gorbachev, clamped a state of emergency on Moscow and swiftly moved to freeze or gut many of the deposed Soviet president's reforms. But less than 24 hours after the Kremlin hard-liners made a move that shocked the world, some army units were defying them by racing to the aid of Russian President Boris N.