MOSCOW – About halfway through her flight to cover the September 1 hostage-taking in Beslan, Anna Politkovskaya – an award-winning Russian journalist and frequent critic of the Kremlin’s policy in Chechnya – lost consciousness.

The last thing she remembers is sipping a cup of tea handed to her by a flight attendant. She woke up hours later in a hospital in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, with nurses telling her she had been near death when brought in.

“My dear, they tried to poison you,” one of the nurses whispered in Ms. Politkovskaya’s ear. Doctors told her the proof – tests taken when she landed without a pulse at the airport – had been destroyed “on orders from above.”

Ms. Politkovskaya never made it to Beslan, where the hostage siege ended 53 hours later with Russian forces storming the building as children ran screaming into the streets and bodies piled up on the grass. More than 335 people, including scores of children, were killed and dozens are still unaccounted for.

Two weeks after waking up in the hospital, Ms. Politkovskaya sat yesterday in the offices of her newspaper – Novaya Gazeta – with few doubts about who had poisoned her.

“I’m a journalist, I deal in facts and I have no proof, so I can’t say for certain it was the authorities,” she said. “But who else would do this? Who else?”

Moscow is coming under stinging criticism for its handling of the press during the Beslan crisis. In a report released yesterday, a European press watchdog accused Russian authorities of detaining and harassing journalists covering the standoff and called their actions “a serious drawback for a democracy.”

Russian and foreign press outlets struggled to make sense of “insufficient, contradictory, and incorrect information,” said the report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s press freedom office.

“Cases of detention and harassment of journalists occurred, seriously impeding their work,” it adds.

Ms. Politkovskaya wasn’t the only Russian journalist not to make it to Beslan. Andrei Babitsky, a reporter for American-sponsored Radio Liberty, was detained at a Moscow airport on his way to cover the siege. Mr. Babitsky was arrested for “hooliganism” and jailed for five days after two young men picked a fight with him at the air port. The two later told the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets that they had been hired by the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the former KGB, to start the fight.

Ms. Politkovskaya also wasn’t the only journalist to accuse the authorities of poisoning. Nana Lezhava, a reporter with Georgia’s Rustavi-2 television network, told Novaya Gazeta she was poisoned while held by the FSB in Beslan. Ms. Lezhava said she and her crew were detained on September 4 for not having the proper documents to work in the region. They were taken to an FSB building in the nearby city of Vladikavkaz, where Ms. Lezhava said she underwent a “forced gynecological inspection.” Afterwards, she was given coffee and sandwiches. She passed out and woke up 24 hours later in the hospital, feeling weak and disoriented. The next day, she and her cameraman were handed over to Georgian authorities at the border.

Ms. Lezhava is recovering in a hospital and her doctor, Fridon Todua, said it was clear she was poisoned.

“We definitely found a toxic substance in her body, so now the challenge is to identify it….Everything from our tests points to a serious case of poisoning.”

More than a dozen other journalists reported cases of harassment. During and after the September 3 storming of the schools, tapes of the incident were confiscated by both officials and civilians from TV crews from two German networks, Associated Press Television News, and Georgia’s Rustavi-2.

Foreign television networks broadcast live footage of the storming of the school, but Russia’s two largest TV channels – both state-run – did not interrupt regularly scheduled programming.

Since President Putin came to power in 2000, the Kremlin has assumed virtual control of Russia’s four major television channels. News programs are now dominated by dry, unquestioning accounts of Mr. Putin’s day or positive stories about the government. Even the last nominally independent television network, NTV, has seriously curtailed analytical coverage after its director was fired following government complaints over its coverage of the 2002 Moscow theater crisis.

Russians newspapers have largely remained freer of government interference, and many were fiercely critical of the handling of the Beslan crisis. But there are indications that the printed press is also coming under pressure to conform.

Two days after the end of the siege, the respected editor of Russia’s Izvestia newspaper was forced to step down because of his paper’s critical coverage, which included shocking, full-page photographs of wounded and dead children.

Raf Shakirov said he and the paper’s management “disagreed on the format of this issue. It was considered too emotional.”

The paper is owned by nickel baron Vladimir Potanin, who Ms. Politkovskaya said was doubtless trying to curry favor with Mr. Putin because he fears suffering the fate of oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is on trial on fraud charges.

“In a way, what we are seeing is a return to Soviet-era censorship, but with different methods, a style that is not Soviet,” Ms. Politkovskaya said.

While the Soviet regime relied on its monopoly on the press to control the flow of information, today’s Kremlin is using subtler methods, she said. By applying pressure to press owners and individual journalists, she said, the Kremlin ensures that only those loyal enough will ever have access to an audience.

Those who refuse to conform, she said, are marginalized.

“Theoretically, now I can get to the places I need to, publish my articles in Novaya Gazeta or the Western press, my world is open,” she said. “The problem is no longer with me, with the journalist, but with our access to society. One or two newspapers aren’t enough when all the television stations are controlled. The Russian people are in an information vacuum.”