Pravda
Pravda ("Truth") was the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, founded 1912 (as Bolshevik legal daily; re-founded 1917). As the party's central organ it combined news, ideological editorials, and policy promulgation until 1991.
History
- Founded by Bolsheviks including Stalin (its first editor) as a workers' paper against the liquidationist trend.
- Under Lenin and Stalin it was the authoritative voice of party lines — Five-Year Plan campaigns, Stakhanovite movement, wartime reporting.
- Post-Stalin decline mirrored the party's own: circulation remained massive but readership increasingly skeptical by the Brezhnev era ("they write it in Pravda" jokes).
- Closed August 1991; successor paper continues in Russia under separate ownership.
Significance
Pravda exemplified the party-press model: journalism as instrument of political line rather than commodity. Its Western caricature ("Pravda lies") obscures both its genuine mass function and the real problems of socialist media — bureaucratization of truth once debate was suppressed.