Word: pravda
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...journalist, and the officials had carefully rehearsed their opening thoughts. Baltabai Yusupov, an Uzbek newspaper editor in Tashkent, even introduced what he called "strictly my own personal opinion" by noting for the record: "Of course, I personally agree entirely with the position expressed by Comrade Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev in Pravda." Last month the Soviet President justified the invasion as a defense of Afghanistan against intervention by the forces of "imperialism...
...government economic planners as one of the Soviet Union's finest industrial achievements. N.V. Bosenko, chairman of the State Committee for Agricultural Technology of the Russian Republic, lavished praise on the executive responsible for the plant's construction. A year after the factory was officially in operation, Pravda called the plant "a thing of beauty, the largest in the industry, meeting the needs of all the collective and state farms of the Northwest." Raved the party newspaper: "Just look at the blueprints! You will see an industrial miracle...
Well, not quite. Pravda had sent Correspondent Ilya Shatunovsky to see the miracle in action. What he actually found was a dilapidated fence guarded by an elderly watchman armed with an antique rifle. Peering through holes in the fence, Shatunovsky glimpsed a wasteland: "Some bare scaffolding standing amid broken bricks and lumps of dry cement." Where was the factory? The answer: there wasn...
...Pravda's cautionary tale, headlined "The Factory That Wasn't," was one of the newspaper's occasional exposés of individual wrongdoing designed to explain why Soviet central planners are unable to meet their goals. In the case of the factory that wasn't, Russians were inevitably reminded of the ruse employed by the 18th century courtier Grigori Potemkin, who erected false fronts on poverty-stricken villages in order to persuade Empress Catherine the Great that her realm was truly prosperous...
...cover-up been worked? According to Pravda, construction of the factory began in 1974, but the builders did a poor job, and by the time the scheduled date for completion came around, construction funds had run out. Rather than admit failure, A.V. Prokhorovich, the deputy chairman of the State Committee for Agricultural Technology, appointed a commission to certify that the plant had been duly completed, although, as Pravda pointed out, "joyful birdies were already building their nests in the unfinished buildings." Commission members who proved reluctant to sign a formal statement of completion were fired or bypassed. After officials...