Information Is Not Truth

Precisely at 3 p.m. in a slate grey, glass-fronted, six-story building on Moscow's Pushkin Square, the subeditors and department heads of Izvestia (Information) trooped into the office of Editor in Chief Konstantin A. Gubin for the planyorka, or editorial conference. At the same time, 14 blocks north, Pavel A. Satyukov, editor in chief of Pravda (Truth), Moscow's other big morning paper, summoned the top members of his staff. There was no debate over policy. There was some debate about space allotments, e.g., between the Department of Propaganda and the Department of Soviet Constructions. But the planyorka was no more than a ritual. Within 15 minutes it was over at both papers. The editors filed back to their cubbyholes (there are no city rooms), ate fruit from common bowls, and followed orders. About midnight, the presses of both papers began to roll the interminable party line.

In just that way last week ran one editorial day after another for two of the most powerful editorial voices in the world--Izvestia (circ. 1,800,000), official organ of the 15 Soviet states, and Pravda (circ. 5,560,000), the mouthpiece of the Communist Party. While Pravda and Izvestia are two of the most widely known of all press names, their behind-the-walls operation is perhaps the least understood.

Making a Profit. Physically, both papers resemble U.S. newspaper establishments, down to the electric-lighted news streamer, flowing endlessly in the Cyrillic alphabet, along the top of Izvestia's fac,ade. Their newsmen earn surprisingly good salaries: a junior reporter on Pravda 's local 120-man staff gets 1,500 rubles ($375) a month base pay, plus an average of $250 more in space rates. Besides this

Moscow-based news contingent, Pravda keeps 60 fulltime correspondents scattered throughout Russia, another 28 in world capitals. The paper controls a sanitarium, five Moscow apartment buildings, a secondary school, a school for printers, and the Pravda House of Culture. Its mammoth printing plant--49 Linotypes, 5,000 employes--harvests a handsome profit by printing 20 other newspapers and magazines on contract.

Though smaller (60 Moscow newsmen, 65 correspondents in Russia and ten abroad), Izvestia is every bit as profitable as big brother: on a recent visit to this country, Assistant Editor A. G. Baulin confided to a U.S. publisher that the paper reaps an annual profit of $10 million, clears 2-c- on every copy it sells.

No true Western parallel exists for Pravda or Izvestia, or indeed, for the Soviet press as a whole. Each day, it spews 57 million copies of 7,686 papers across the land. Identical in size--18 1/2 in. by 23 1/2 in., four to six pages--all are of such a numbing editorial sameness that E. A. Lazebnik, deputy director of propaganda for the party Central Committee in the Ukraine, was moved in 1956 to complain with singular bluntness: "If one were to conceal the names of newspapers, it would be almost impossible to tell which is which."

A Dose for News. Unlike their Western counterparts, Soviet journalists need pay scant attention to the significant events of the day. The kind of stories that fill U.S. newspapers--including international tensions, local crime and disasters--are almost totally ignored unless they make a party-line point. Pravda's Satyukov stopped the presses only twice this year, once to insert a dispatch from the Russian news agency Tass covering U.A.W.-C.I.O. President Walter Reuther's phony "March of the Unemployed" on Washington (TIME, March 2), once to report Konrad Adenauer's decision to yield the West German chancellorship.

What passes for news is a massive daily dose of party propaganda, dished out dully: party directives and pep talks, party speeches, party promotion lists, party comings and goings, party polemic and praise. Since Stalin's death, the propaganda dose has been sweetened somewhat in a calculated effort to liberalize the press--and to keep the reader swallowing the party pill. With full official sanction, newspapers began criticizing each other: "Soviet newspapers," wrote Pravda in a recent and scathing Press Day editorial, "are insipid, lifeless, deadly dull and difficult to read." Komsomolskaya Pravda, the youth paper, erupted in a rash of sensational feature stories, e.g., "What Role Does Love Play in Marriage?" Pravda's publishing house gave birth to a new daily, Sovetskaya Rossia, which in three years has built a circulation of 1,500,000 by offering jaded citizens a giddy diet of local news, lively pictures, display ads and reader polls.

But most Russians go to their mailbox or wait patiently in the midmorning kiosk queue for a copy of Pravda or Izvestia. Readers write the papers thousands of letters every week, usually complaining against some service or some minor bureaucrat. They have a private joke which has become a national truism: "In Pravda there is no information, in Izvestia there is no truth." At day's end, by long tradition, the reader hands his paper over to the neighbor on bathroom duty in the cooperative apartment house. Then, by almost unanimous agreement, Pravda and Izvestia come into their own: torn into tidy squares, they wait on the porcelain tank of the toilet.

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