¶ Nikolai Lenin decreed the functions of the Communist press long before Russia's revolution. The press was to be "propagandist, agitator and organizer."
¶ Joseph Stalin, a founder of the Bolshevik press, shaped it to Lenin's formula.
Last week Russia celebrated Press Day, 32nd anniversary of the birth of the Soviet press in the revolutionary underground. Florid editorials proclaimed the press's role anew. Writers, editors, correspondents got official awards.
The Soviet press is thousands of town, village and factory papers, shop wall newspapers, group publications for trade unions, the Party, youth, the Army. But most important are the three big Moscow dailies, Pravda, Izvestia, Red Star, and two magazines, Crocodile and War and the Working Class.
The Big Three rarely appear in Moscow before midmorning. They are sold out almost at once. Lines form at kiosks for them. Nonbuying Muscovites stand in line to read displayed pages. Mats are flown to principal cities for limited reprints. Factories often call special gatherings to discuss the news.
The Big Three are cut from the same pattern. Their page size is the same as that of standard U.S. papers. Each costs 20 kopecks (a subway ride costs 40, a trolley ride 15). There are no comic strips, no columnists, no crime or scandal, few pictures, only a stick or so of sports news about such things as chess championships. Readers do not miss them. The newly literate Russian masses have so vast an appetite for the written word that they are fascinated by news reports which U.S. readers would find dust-dry. The most that the reader gets in the way of entertainment is an occasional sardonic cartoon —usually aimed at Fascism. He finds a back page largely filled with cut-&-dried foreign news from the official agency, Tass. The front-page formula rarely varies: a Stalin Order of the Day (prikaz) in the two left columns, plus another two columns on military operations (svodka). The two inside pages are devoted to feature articles from the front and to uplifting or critical reports from the collective farms and factories—sometimes written by soldiers and workers.
The Party Line. Press Day marks the anniversary of the founding of Pravda (Truth) at St. Petersburg in 1912. In 32 years Pravda has become the world's biggest daily, with over 3,000,000 circulation, though in wartime its circulation is being held to about 2,000,000.* Its two Moscow buildings spread over the equivalent of two New York City blocks and contain a clinic, restaurant, theater for press workers. Its 21 rotary presses (mostly U.S.-made) can print 1,000,000 copies an hour. The Pravda plant also produces many a book and other publication, notably Komsomolskaya Pravda for Communist youth.
In Pravda the Russian reads what the Central Committee of the Communist Party wants him to read. It is the official Party organ. Stalin, as General Secretary of the Party, is always interested in the tone which Pravda sets for the rest of the Soviet press. Too busy now to give it close personal attention, he is represented in its management by 43-year-old Alexander Sergeevich Shcherbakov, head of the Soviet Information Bureau, member of the all-powerful Politburo.