By 9 A. M. , members of the White House guard, who are under the direct control of parliament speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov, had taken up positions at all the entrances to the Izvestia newspaper offices and its adjacent publishing house, according to Nikolai Bodnaruk, a deputy editor.
The officers, some of whom were posted alongside Izvestia's own guards were checking the building passes of the paper's employees as they came to work, Bodnaruk told The Moscow Times.
The guards were posted, less than one week after parliament voted to take over Izvestia, stepping up a battle that has been waged for months between the conservative legislature and President Boris Yeltsin.
They represent a controversial 5, 000-man armed police force that has been denounced by the speaker's opponents as Khasbulatov's private army. The very existence of the force became known to the broad public only last week when two of its members were involved in a shooting incident in Moscow.
The guards were sent to Izvestia by order of Yury Voronin, a deputy parliament speaker, according to Interfax.
But Sergei Karasyov, the deputy chief of the parliament administration that supervises the guards, said that he had seen no such order.
Although the guards took no action Tuesday, Izvestia said in an editorial that it feared the move marked the beginning of a "methodical plan to smother the newspaper".
"No one knows what will happen next", Bodnaruk said. "Today they are checking documents, tomorrow they won't let us in. Khasbulatov will do everything he can to take the independent Izvestia under his thumb".
The 75-year-old daily, together with its publishing house, declared its independence immediately after the aborted August 1991 coup. But Russia's parliamentarians say they had no right to do so and have demanded since April that the publishing house, which had been run by the Soviet legislature, be returned to them as the rightful heirs.
The parliament made its first moves to take over Izvestia only after the paper printed an article critical of Khasbulatov in 1991, according to Vladimir Nadein, a deputy editor.
With its vote last week, the parliament took control of the publishing facilities, defying a decree that Yeltsin issued two months ago promising to take the paper under his wing.
Technically, the resolution does not allow parliament to take control of the newspaper, but as publisher, parliament has the potential to influence its editorial content and financial status indirectly.
The police have been posted to guard the property, not the editorial staff, Voronin told Interfax. Parliament maintains that the eight-story building occupied by Izvestia's editorial offices is part of the publishing complex and therefore under its control.
To protect itself, the newspaper rushed last week to register itself as a publicly owned company separate from the publishing complex. Until then, the newspaper and publisher had operated as part of one firm.
Among other things, the newspaper staff fear that parliament intends to close them down so that it can use their name for its own paper.
"Khasbulatov wants our name so that he can put out his own paper", Bodnaruk said. "But he won't get it. We will continue to come out".
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