Book Review : Pravda: The Workings of a Finely Tuned News Machine

Pravda: Inside the Soviet News Machine by Angus Roxburgh (Braziller: $19.95; 268 pages)

Angus Roxburgh is a British lecturer and one-time BBC commentator on Soviet affairs. His layman’s guide to Pravda, which is arguably the world’s most important newspaper, could hardly be more timely.

Pravda has a circulation of more than 10 million. Its audience includes the entire Soviet leadership spectrum and every significant foreign ministry and intelligence service in the world.

Clearly, though, much of Pravda’s domestic readership has been pro forma, with subscription undertaken more as a matter of career necessity than choice. As befits a newspaper edited to please party bosses instead of readers, it has a reputation for excruciating dullness.

Since Mikhail S. Gorbachev took over the Kremlin’s top job and inaugurated his policy of glasnost , or openness, there are signs of change. Hitherto forbidden subjects are being discussed and Pravda’s pages are being opened to more diverse ideas. Reader interest is up accordingly.

Careful students of Soviet affairs caution, however, that the habit of control is deeply ingrained. While Soviet editors and reporters are now free to dig up dirt on those who oppose reform programs, they have not been unleashed to publicize views contrary to Gorbachev’s.

No Independent Papers

As Roxburgh points out, there is no such thing as an independent newspaper in the Soviet Union. Pravda is the official organ of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. Trud is published by the Central Trade Union Council. Krasnaya Zvesda is the voice of the military establishment. And so on through the list of 8,400-odd daily and weekly newspapers.

Pravda, as the voice of the Communist Party, is the most authoritative channel by which instructions and opinions are filtered down to lower-level bodies and signals are conveyed to Washington and other Western capitals.

Roxburgh provides interesting insights into Pravda’s long and not so honorable history.

The party organ was founded in 1912, five years before the revolution. In those early days the newspaper reflected policy disagreements among leaders of the small revolutionary party, which included such familiar names as Stalin, Molotov and Lenin.

As late as 1923, when Lenin inaugurated the New Economic Policy, opposing views within the leadership continued to appear in the pages of Pravda. Once Stalin took over, however, the party organ became purely an instrument of conformity and coercion.

Pravda never reported on the mass starvation and executions that occurred during forced collectivization of agriculture. Far from opposing the purges of the 1930s, when so many old Bolsheviks died in the basement of the Lubiyanka, Pravda helped set up the victims.

When Nikita Khrushchev made his 1956 speech detailing the crimes of Stalin, neither Pravda nor any other Soviet newspaper carried a line.

As recently as two years ago, Pravda itself defined the Soviet press as “the faithful assistant of the Leninist Party, a tireless propagandist of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism.” If you substitute the Republican Party and the ideas of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for this verbiage, any intelligent American can figure out for himself that you are talking about a venal, captive press.

‘Press Ahead’

Gorbachev would have us believe that things are different now. Just last month he told a gathering of writers and artists that he approves of their open treatment of the country’s problems. He urged them to “press ahead” with airing “all the controversial issues of past and present.”

Such exhortations, however, do not square with present-day reality. In the same week that Gorbachev spoke, the director of the official news agency in Soviet Kazakhstan was fired for allowing publication of “ideologically harmful material.”

The Soviets have been widely praised for their “openness,” however tardy, in disclosing details of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. To this day, however, the fundamental wisdom of the Kremlin’s commitment to nuclear power has remained unchallenged by the Soviet media.

When a teen-age pilot from Hamburg, West Germany, flew a small Cessna 400 miles through heavily defended air space and landed on the periphery of Red Square in front of several hundred eyewitnesses, no Soviet agency reported the event for more than 24 hours. And even then, they didn’t report what Westerners already knew--that the intruder had landed in the very shadow of the Kremlin Wall.

Roxburgh’s modest study will not tell the professional Kremlinologist anything he doesn’t already know. However, it should make dispatches from Moscow a bit more intelligible to the interested layman who understands that his own fate could be affected by what happens to Gorbachev’s revolution.