The Press: Samizdat West

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Chalidze, 36, who was exiled from Russia in November 1972 for his leadership of a civil liberties group, is editor in chief of the Chronicle. Litvinov, 34, grandson of Stalin's longtime Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, left Russia under pressure from the authorities in 1974, and assists Chalidze from his home in Purchase, N.Y. (British Historian Peter Reddaway serves as the Chronicle's representative in Europe.) The two exiles support themselves as teachers and authors, but the Chronicle's funding is more haphazard. Edward Kline, 43, a Midwest department-store magnate, is the prime underwriter; private foundations and paid subscriptions ($15 a year) help meet the Chronicle's annual $25,000 printing budget. Neither editors nor contributors are paid.

Chalidze and Litvinov do not think of themselves so much as anti-Communists as "legalists." They believe that the Soviet authorities must be admonished for violations of their own constitution, a high-minded document instituted under Stalin, which is honored mostly in the breach. Their position differs sharply from that of the anti-Soviet exile quarterly Kontinent, which is edited in Paris by Author-Poet Vladimir Maximov and has been bankrolled by Axel Springer, the fiercely anti-Communist West German publisher.

More Journalists. The New York Chronicle's editors consider themselves more journalists than ideologues. "We see our job as helping our friends still in the Soviet Union inform world opinion about the situation of civil liberties there," says Pavel Litvinov. "When the Soviet authorities violate the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or for that matter when they adhere to it, we try to make sure that reliable news is available."