Everything about Pravda totally explained
Pravda ("The Truth") was a leading
newspaper of the
Soviet Union and an official organ of the
Central Committee of the
Communist Party between
1912 and
1991. The
Pravda newspaper was started in
1912 in
Vienna,
Austria, and it didn't arrive in
Moscow until
1918. During the
Cold War,
Pravda was well-known in the
West for its pronouncements as the official voice of Soviet Communism (similarly,
Izvestia was the official voice of the Soviet
government).
After the paper was closed down in
1991 by decree of
President Yeltsin, many of the staff founded a new paper with the same name, which is now a
tabloid-style Russian news source. There is an unrelated
Internet-based newspaper,
Pravda Online (
www.Pravda.ru
) run by former Pravda newspaper employees. A number of other newspapers have also been called
Pravda, most notably
Komsomolskaya Pravda, formerly the official newspaper of the now defunct
Komsomol and currently the best-selling
tabloid in Russia.
Origins
The Vienna Pravda
The original
Pravda was founded by
Leon Trotsky as a Russian
social democratic newspaper aimed at Russian workers. The paper was published abroad to avoid
censorship and was smuggled into Russia. The first issue was published in
Vienna,
Austria on
October 3,
1908. The editorial staff consisted of Trotsky and, at various times,
Victor Kopp,
Adolf Joffe and
Matvey Skobelev. The last two had wealthy parents and supported the paper financially.
Since the
Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was then split into multiple factions and since Trotsky was a self-described 'non-factional social democrat', the newspaper spent much of its time trying to unite party factions. The editors tried to avoid the factional issues that divided Russian émigrés and concentrated on the issues of interest to Russian workers. Coupled with a lively and easy to understand style, it made the paper very popular in Russia.
In January
1910, the party's
Central Committee had a rare plenary meeting with all party factions represented. A comprehensive agreement to re-unite the party was worked out and tentatively agreed upon. As part of the agreement, Trotsky's
Pravda was made a party-financed central organ.
Lev Kamenev, a leading member of the
Bolshevik faction and
Lenin's close associate, was made a member of the editorial board, but he withdrew in August 1910 once the reconciliation attempt failed. The newspaper published its last issue on
April 15,
1912.
The Saint Petersburg Pravda
During the 1917 Revolution
The overthrow of
Czar Nicholas II by the
February Revolution of
1917 allowed
Pravda to reopen. The original editors of the newly reincarnated
Pravda,
Vyacheslav Molotov and
Alexander Shlyapnikov, were opposed to the liberal
Russian Provisional Government. However, when Kamenev, Stalin and former Duma deputy
Matvei Muranov returned from Siberian exile on March 12, they ousted Molotov and Shlyapnikov and took over the editorial board.
Under Kamenev's and Stalin's influence,
Pravda took a conciliatory tone towards the Provisional Government -- "insofar as it struggles against reaction or counter-revolution" -- and called for a unification conference with the internationalist wing of the Mensheviks. On March 14, Kamenev wrote in his first editorial:
» What purpose would it serve to speed things up, when things were already taking place at such a rapid pace?
and on March 15 he supported the war effort:
» When army faces army, it would be the most insane policy to suggest to one of those armies to lay down its arms and go home. This wouldn't be a policy of peace, but a policy of slavery, which would be rejected with disgust by a free people.
After Lenin's and
Grigory Zinoviev's return to Russia on April 3, Lenin strongly condemned the Provisional Government and unification tendencies in his
April Theses. Kamenev argued against Lenin's position in
Pravda editorials, but Lenin prevailed at the April Party conference, at which point
Pravda also condemned the Provisional Government as "counter-revolutionary". From then on,
Pravda essentially followed Lenin's editorial stance. After the
October Revolution of 1917 Pravda was selling nearly 100,000 copies daily.
The Soviet period
The offices of the newspaper were transferred to
Moscow on
March 3,
1918 when the Soviet capital was moved there.
Pravda became an official publication, or "organ", of the
Soviet Communist Party.
Pravda became the conduit for announcing official policy and policy changes and would remain so until 1991. Subscription to
Pravda was mandatory for state run companies, the
armed services and other organizations until 1989.
Other newspapers existed as organs of other state bodies. For example,
Izvestia — which covered
foreign relations — was the organ of the
Supreme Soviet,
Trud was the organ of the
trade union movement, etc. Various derivatives of the name
Pravda were used both for a number newspapers of national circulation (
Komsomolskaya Pravda was the organ of the
Komsomol organization, and
Pionerskaya Pravda was the organ of
Young Pioneers), and for the regional Communist Party newspapers in many republics and provinces of the USSR, for example
Kazakhstanskaya Pravda in
Kazakhstan,
Polyarnaya Pravda in
Murmansk Oblast,
Pravda Severa in
Arkhangelsk Oblast, or
Moskovskaya Pravda in the city of Moscow.
In the period after the death of Lenin in
1924,
Pravda was to form a power base for
Nikolai Bukharin, one of the rival party leaders, who edited the newspaper, which helped him reinforce his reputation as a
Marxist theoretician.
Similarly, after the death of Stalin in
1953 and the ensuing power vacuum, Communist Party leader
Nikita Khrushchev used his alliance with
Dmitry Shepilov,
Pravda's editor-in-chief, to gain the upper hand in his struggle with Prime Minister
Georgy Malenkov.
A number of places and things in the Soviet Union were named after
Pravda. Among them was the city of
Pravdinsk in
Gorky Oblast (the home of a
paper mill producing much
newsprint for
Pravda and other national newspapers), and a number of streets and
collective farms.
As the names of the main Communist newspaper and the main Soviet newspaper, Pravda and Izvestia, meant "the truth" and "the news" respectively, a popular Russian saying was "v Pravde net izvestiy, v Izvestiyakh net pravdy" (In the
Truth there's no news, and in the
News there's no truth).
The post-Soviet period
On
August 22,
1991, a
decree by
Russian President Boris Yeltsin shut down the
Communist Party and seized all of its property, including
Pravda. Its team of
journalists fought for their newspaper and freedom of speech. They registered a new paper with the same title just weeks after.
A few months later, then-editor
Gennady Seleznyov (now a member of the
Duma) sold
Pravda to a
family of
Greek entrepreneurs, the Yannikoses. The next editor-in-chief,
Alexander Ilyin, handed
Pravda's
trademark — the
Order of Lenin medals — and the new registration certificate over to the new owners.
By that time, a serious split occurred in the editorial office. Over 90% of the journalists who had been working for
Pravda until
1991 quit their jobs. They established their own version of the newspaper, which was later shut down under government pressure. These same journalists, led by former Pravda editors Vadim Gorshenin and Viktor Linnik in January
1999, launched
Pravda Online, the first
web-based newspaper in the Russian language;
English,
Italian and
Portuguese versions are also available.
The new
Pravda newspaper and
Pravda Online are not related in any way, although the journalists of both publications are still in touch with each other. The paper
Pravda tends to analyze events from a
leftist point of view, while the web-based, tabloid-style newspaper often takes a
nationalist and sensationalist approach.
Meanwhile, in 2004, a new urban guide
Pravda has been launched in Lithuania. It has no stylistic resemblance to the original communist
Pravda, although its mission purports "to report the truth and nothing but the truth".
The newspaper of the
Communist Party of the Russian Federation is also called
Gazeta "Pravda".
Pravda in arts
Further Information
Get more info on 'Pravda'.
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