Pravda

Before 1912: earlier publications of the same name

The masthead 'Pravda' did not begin with the Bolshevik daily of 1912. A monthly Pravda covering arts, literature and social life was founded in Moscow in 1903 by the railway engineer and art historian V. A. Kozhevnikov; its contributors included A. A. Bogdanov, M. N. Pokrovsky and I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov, later activists of the Bolshevik faction. After quarrels with the editorial board the journal passed to the Menshevik faction and then became the organ of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic organization Spilka, effectively ceasing by 1906. This 1903 publication is why some histories count the paper's span from 1903.

From October 1908 to April 1912 a Social-Democratic newspaper also called Pravda, edited by Leon Trotsky, was published first as the 'Vienna Pravda' in Geneva, then Lvov and finally Vienna; Adolf Ioffe headed its international department, and in 1910 the Central Committee member Lev Kamenev joined its board, making it briefly a de facto organ of the RSDLP Central Committee, though that status was never formally conferred.

Founding and the years 1912-1914

In January 1912 the Sixth All-Russian (Prague) Conference of the RSDLP, on Lenin's initiative, decided to publish a mass workers' daily. Money was collected by workers in factories, and the Lena shootings that April accelerated the launch. The first issue appeared on 5 May 1912 (22 April OS), Karl Marx's birthday, but Pravda was not yet the official organ of the party Central Committee; that role belonged to Sotsial-Demokrat, printed abroad and smuggled in.

Pravda initially printed 40,000 to 60,000 copies, and 285 works by Lenin appeared in it in 1912-1914. Until December 1912 the official publisher was N. G. Poletaev and thereafter A. E. Badaev; Maxim Gorky headed the literary department and Vyacheslav Molotov worked as editorial secretary. The editors of the Vienna paper protested sharply against the reuse of the name, but the title remained with Lenin's paper.

The struggle with the censors was the history of Pravda in these years. First closed on 3 (16) July 1913, of its 356 issues 49 were confiscated and 21 fined. Each closure was answered by a change of masthead; Rabochaya Pravda, Severnaya Pravda, Pravda Truda, Za Pravdu, Proletarskaya Pravda, Puti Pravdy and Trudovaya Pravda followed in turn, each with its own record of confiscated issues. On 8 (21) July 1914, on the eve of the First World War, the paper was definitively banned.

1917 and the Soviet organ

After the February Revolution it resumed on 5 (18) March 1917 as the organ of the Central Committee and the Petrograd Committee of the RSDLP(b), its print run reaching 85,000-90,000 copies. Some Russian accounts state that the paper was actively financed by Germany through Parvus at this time, citing a letter of 3 December 1917 from the German state secretary Kühlmann to the Kaiser. This is an attributed scholarly controversy quoting German state documents, not settled fact, and must be presented with its attribution.

On 5 (18) July 1917, after the anti-government demonstrations in Petrograd, the paper was closed and until October appeared under names such as Listok Pravdy and Rabochy i Soldat; after the October Revolution it reappeared as 'Pravda' on 27 October (9 November) 1917 as the organ of the party Central Committee. Nikolai Bukharin became its editor. With the liquidation of the non-communist press in 1918, Pravda supplanted the organ of the Soviets, Izvestia, as the country's main newspaper, and the day its first issue appeared, 5 May, was declared Press Day in 1922 for its tenth anniversary.

In the Soviet period Pravda was a political institution, not merely a newspaper. Its own printing house, begun in 1931, went into operation in May 1934; from June 1931 matrices of the central newspapers were flown to Leningrad so that Moscow and Leningrad received the paper on the same day, later replaced by phototelegraph transmission to major cities. What Pravda printed and did not print was often decided in the Politburo, and its articles and feuilletons were equated with a government decree or a court verdict. Ideological campaigns such as the Stakhanovite movement, the criticism of Zoshchenko and Akhmatova, the struggle against 'rootless cosmopolitanism' and the virgin-lands campaign began on its pages. Circulation reached 10.6 million in 1975, largely because party members were obliged to subscribe to party publications. From 25 April 1972 it appeared in two editions for different regions to account for time zones and delivery; unlike other Soviet papers, which came out six times a week, Pravda appeared daily.

After 1991

Pravda was among nine newspapers not closed by the decree of the State Committee for the State of Emergency on 19 August 1991. On 22 August it appeared for the last time as the 'organ of the CPSU Central Committee', and that same day its publication was suspended by a decree of Boris Yeltsin. It resumed in September 1991 as a general political newspaper issued by its labour collective under the editor-in-chief Gennady Seleznyov, though the staff lost most of its premises in the building at 24 Pravda Street. In 1992 ZAO 'Pravda-International' was created and until 1996 the newspaper was financed by the Greek Giannikos businessmen; publication was suspended again by the Russian Ministry of the Press after the events of 4 October 1993 and resumed on 21 October 1993 with Viktor Linnik as the new editor-in-chief. Around this time part of the editorial staff moved to the internet outlet Pravda.ru, and in 1996 a dispute between owners and journalists split Pravda into different entities. The CPRF acquired the paper, which from April 1997 appeared as an organ of the party under editor-in-chief Alexander Ilyin. On 24 February 2013 the Fifteenth Congress of the CPRF adopted a party statute whose preamble states that Pravda is the party's official printed organ.

Distinctions and examples

Pravda differed from the other central Soviet newspapers. Izvestia, the organ of the Supreme Soviet, covered foreign relations; Trud was the organ of the state-controlled trade union movement; Bednota was distributed to the Red Army and rural peasants. Derivatives of the name were used for many national and regional papers: Komsomolskaya Pravda was the organ of the Komsomol and Pionerskaya Pravda that of the Young Pioneers, while republic and provincial party committees published their own Pravdas such as Kazakhstanskaya Pravda and Polyarnaya Pravda. The adage that 'there is no news in Pravda and no truth in Izvestia', playing on the words 'truth' and 'news', is the best-known comment on this system's standing.

Because an article in Pravda could be read as a signal of a change in Soviet policy or the outcome of a power struggle, Western Sovietologists read it closely and attended to the smallest shifts of wording. On 5 May 2012 the paper marked its centenary in the Column Hall of the House of Unions, with Gennady Zyuganov speaking and congratulatory telegrams from President Dmitry Medvedev and President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus. From 1962 a 'Pravda' cross-country race was held and from 1968 athletics competitions for the paper's prize, and in 1988 the Season Cup for the prizes of Pravda began. The American company East View Information Services digitized the archive of Pravda issues, available free of charge from the reading rooms of many Russian libraries.

Some name confusions are worth recording. When US senator John McCain tried to publish in Pravda in 2013, the CPRF-owned paper refused because his article was not aligned with the party's political positions, and his op-ed appeared instead in the online Pravda.ru. Separately, the 'Pravda' disinformation network known as Portal Kombat was created in 2013 by a Ukrainian citizen from Crimea, was expanded in 2022 to target the Russian-speaking population during the Russian invasion, operates sites in several languages and deliberately disseminates content intended as training data for large language models. It is unrelated to the newspaper.