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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.