The Home of Truth

No bourgeois Chamber of Commerce ever did it better. In Moscow last week, between sessions of the Foreign Ministers' Conference, the Russians kept U.S. correspondents panting with a dizzy round of sightseeing tours. Forty of them inspected the Kremlin (BUT NARY A GANDER AT JOE, headlined the New York Daily News). Side trips to Leningrad, Stalingrad and other cities were coming up. And a wide-eyed party was escorted through the nine-story plant of Pravda, Russia's biggest (circ. 2,500,000) newspaper.

Pravda ("Truth"), they learned, prints no crime or disaster stories (the editors think that type of news is unimportant) ; it has no bustling "city room," for the editors and most writers have offices and secretaries of their own; the average reporter's salary is about 1,500 to 2,000 rubles a month ($282 to $376). It takes a staff of 430 editorial workers to get out the four-page paper, but even so Pravda turns a profit for the Communist Party.

In the pressroom the tourists saw big banners, bearing such slogans as "The Socialist obligation of the five-year plan is to do the best you can." One was more curt: "Get the paper out on time."

As a special courtesy, young Cyrus L. Sulzberger of the New York Times got a private tour (Russian correspondents at U.N. had visited his uncle's plant some months ago). He noted that Pravda' s acidulous David Zaslavsky, journalistic gadfly of the Western World, is "an amiable man who looks like anybody's favorite grandfather." On the mass tour, the Associated Press's Wes Gallagher found that Peter Pospelov, Pravda's editorial chief, "looks like a member of a Midwestern legislature." Pravda gets 15,000 letters a month from its readers, only 40 or 50 of them complaints.

The tour ended up in Pravda's paneled, carpeted conference room, a Hollywood version of a Wall Street office. There, over glasses of tea, the U.S. visitors got down to what was on their minds. About those complaints, now -- do Pravda's readers ever criticize the paper for its attacks on the Western powers? Replied Editor Pospelov: "Yes -- they say we should make them stronger." Who appoints the paper's editors? "The Communist Central Committee." What happens when the Communist Party disapproves of a Pravda article? Replied ace Commentator Boris Izakov: "Nothing. That does not happen very often."

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