Word: pravda
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When Mikhail Gorbachev decided a year ago that the Communist Party daily Pravda needed a face-lift, he appointed Politburo ally and confidant Ivan Frolov, 61, to perform the surgery. Frolov quickly pledged that the conservative Soviet mouthpiece would strive to reflect the "pluralism of opinions" within the Communist Party. But the promised glasnost failed to materialize. Last month at an open party meeting, Pravda employees angrily demanded their editor in chief's resignation. Frolov, they fumed, was high- handed, rude and a sycophant of the worst order. Staff members charged that he muzzled editorial voices and blocked attempts...
Initially, Frolov offered to resign. But after the Central Committee insisted that he stay put, he went on the offensive. Last week he announced a new and more autonomous Pravda, one that will be independently managed, will accept advertising from foreign firms and will strive harder to woo back readers. Although the paper will retain "deep ideological ties" with the party, it will be run by an independent association that will not only publish Pravda (the name means truth) and its Sunday supplement but will also develop a television program, an international edition and a string of advertising supplements...
Frolov claimed the autonomy of the Pravda Association, whose membership is as yet undetermined, would free the paper and its new ventures from control and funding by the Central Committee. Instead, money will be provided by foreign advertisers and unnamed "major international information magnates...
Nonetheless, the mass-circulation newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda the next day achieved a bizarre fusion of conservative-radical coup rumors; it said ; military forces had been put on alert in early September to thwart a planned takeover by radicals who had organized armed assault groups. "The facts in this article were invented," Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov protested in Parliament. "No one is is preparing paratroopers for actions against the people." But even that did not kill the conspiracy talk. Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov and members of the Russian Federation government charged that Communist Party provocateurs and military hard-liners were trying...
...last week's parliamentary debate over the country's economic destiny, many Soviet lawmakers could not tear their eyes from the newspapers in their laps. Here was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the exiled dissident, writing a polemic about the nation's current crisis in the pages of nothing less than Komsomolskaya Pravda (circ. 22 million), the mouthpiece of the Young Communist League. The 16,000-word text was also printed in Literaturnaya Gazeta (4.5 million), which only five years ago berated its author as "that vile scum of a traitor...