All Putin All the Time.(Vladimir Putin)

High on the eighth floor of Russia's national television center, journalists from NTV gather for what amounts to a council of war. With tense and tired faces, they listen as one of the station's lawyers, Yuri Bagrayev, briefs them on the day's big news--the latest twist in a prolonged campaign to shut them down. "Don't have any illusions," Bagrayev warns. The government is against you, the courts are fixed, the police could come at any time to drive you out. "Get ready. Soon you'll have to make a choice."

That "choice," as they see it, is to stick to their principles as Russia's most critical television journalists, and perhaps lose their jobs, or to pay obeisance to their likely new owners, allies of President Vladimir Putin. NTV is the sole remaining independent television channel in Russia, the only voice of the country's increasingly enfeebled political opposition. Slowly but surely, Putin and his supporters have muted--if not silenced--media critical of him and his policies. NTV has been among the harshest, reporting aggressively on the failed war in Chechnya, official corruption and the embarrassing scandal surrounding the sinking of the submarine Kursk.

Now it's payback time. Last week its powerful creditor Gazprom, goaded on by the Kremlin, cobbled together a majority of shares in NTV--and launched a coup. At an extraordinary meeting in Moscow, shareholders unceremoniously fired the board and tossed out the station's general director, Yevgeny Kiselev. His loyalists now expect a purge of their ranks--but they insist they will stick by him, no matter what. Journalists fear their new bosses, whose legitimacy they refuse to recognize, will use NTV's shaky finances as an excuse to impose a new editorial line. That line, they say, will be Putin's. To end the country's long slide into chaos and disintegration, the president seems to think he needs all the help he can get. And as he sees it, that does not include a free press nipping at his flanks. "Deep inside he finds it absurd that somebody has the right to publicly discuss his activities," one of his former aides recently told a Moscow newspaper.

The battle for NTV has long been brewing. Masked police have raided the station dozens of times over the past year, detaining employees and even jailing the company's founder, media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky, for three days last summer. But now, almost 10 months after it began, the fight is ratcheting up dramatically. Mikhail Gorbachev, an NTV trustee and generally a conciliatory voice in Russian politics, spoke out with unusual fierceness. "We won't engage in any contacts with these usurpers," said the former president. NTV's journalists quickly went on strike. They temporarily banned advertising and all nonnews programming. In its place, they offered live footage of the company's studios, the staff massed to block a possible forcible eviction. Supporters brought in stocks of groceries. Protesters gathered in front of the building.

The standoff is only just beginning, and much will be at stake in likely negotiations. As they hunkered down last Thursday, NTV's journalists received a visit from a man they regard as the Kremlin's proxy--Alfred Kokh, head of Gazprom's media holding company. If it weren't for $473 million worth of loans that Gazprom had guaranteed from an American bank, Kokh ...