Word: pravda
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Western press like captured battlefield communiqués. Specialists in Bonn, London, Paris and Washington sift through its stilted, often impenetrable prose searching for subtle shifts in foreign policy. Photographs of the ruling elite are scrutinized for changes in status, and cartoons are scoured for arcane political references. "Pravda," says its editor, Victor Afanasyev, "is read on the lines and between the lines...
Indeed, few newspapers are read as closely or taken as seriously as Pravda (circ. 11 million), the Soviet Union's leading daily. (Second in importance is Izvestiya, the government daily, circ. 8.6 million.) The paper is published by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and toes the party line, hence the government line, on matters great and small. Pravda means truth, but when facts and ideology collide, ideology prevails. Says Thomas Kolesnichenko, Pravda correspondent in New York: "We try to give people a story that is true, but in terms of a historical perspective, in terms...
...Pravda is skinny compared with U.S. dailies (only six pages most days), partly because there are no advertisements, partly because newsprint supplies are chronically short. But the paper's production and distribution system dwarfs anything in the West. Pages are transmitted by satellite to printing plants in more than 40 cities, so the whole country gets delivery the same morning. Pravda employs 180 editors and writers in Moscow, 60 staff reporters around the country and 40 foreign correspondents. Fewer than half of these journalists come from journalism schools; the rest have worked their way up from small papers...
...Because Pravda is, in effect, the voice of the party, the paper does not have a government censor. The editors are responsible for blue-penciling incorrect thinking, but they rarely have to. Explains Arkadi Polishchuk, a New York-based émigré who sometimes writes for Pravda: "A Soviet journalist knows what will pass and what won't. He has an 'inner editor' within him. One step out of line and a journalist's career is washed...
...letters to the editor of Pravda serve as an important forum for Soviet citizens to air pet peeves, make suggestions and scold their less virtuous countrymen. "Every day in the school snack bar, Sasha gets change from a five-ruble bill," wrote a schoolteacher from the Moscow region earlier this year, complaining about how children today do not appreciate the value of a hard-earned ruble. "The parents aren't interested in how their children spend the remaining money." A lieutenant colonel stationed in Lithuania urged parents not to send money to their army sons, already well cared...