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 façade. 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¢ 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—18½ in. by 23½ 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."