Soviet Circulation Battle

U.S. newspapers would face ruin if they lost circulation the way leading Soviet dailies did last year. Izvestia, the government paper, was down 300,000 (to 7,500,000). Komsomolskaya Pravda, the journal of the Communist youth, was down 500,000 (to 6,300,000). Pravda, the official party mouthpiece, suffered the most spectacular drop of all; it was down 1,000,000 copies (to 6,000,000). But oddly enough, the decline is a healthy sign of sorts.

More for a Revisionist. Under the Stalinist system of centralized planning, newspapers were arbitrarily allocated newsprint and assigned press runs. Often the runs far exceeded the sales, but no matter: the State Committee on Publishing merely split the cost of unsold copies between distributors and the publishers. For the past two years, however, the government has been trying to make selected industries operate on a supply-and-demand basis. Applying this principle to the newspaper business, the government ordered that press runs be more closely matched to actual sales --hence the sudden circulation drop.

Under the new system, only publications that genuinely manage to boost sales are allocated more newsprint, which is perennially in short supply. For instance, Novy Mir Editor Aleksandr Tvardovsky last year received more pages for his crusading literary monthly, which keeps irritating party bosses with exposes of social and economic abuses. Even though (or perhaps because) he had been ousted from the Communist Party Central Committee for "revisionism," readership was going up. Mostly, the competitive pressure is causing the papers to shed some of their drabness. Headlines are boxed in color, the number of pictures has increased, the quality of newsprint and typography has improved. Political puritanism and pre-publication censorship still keep the mass-circulation national papers, such as Pravda and Izvestia, from carrying stories about sex and murder, though such crimes are now sometimes reported in the local press.

Less for Officialdom. The national papers have been trying to win readers, who pay two kopecks (the price of two cigarettes) per paper, by publishing more human-interest stories. Last year, for instance, they covered the Tashkent earthquakes, which would previously have been reported only in the local Uzbek papers. Izvestia recently ran a story describing how a bus skidded and fell into a lake--albeit in a very positive way. It reported that a policeman rescued six of the passengers, but said nothing about the other 64, who presumably were not so lucky.

The papers no longer regularly quote the pronouncements of party officialdom in full. Coverage of economics has become less boastful. Soviet newspapers are still far from what they might be. But they are getting better as they begin to face reality and, at least in a small way, battle for circulation.

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