British Communist Daily Calls on Readers to Donate $240,000

The Morning Star, Britain’s Communist daily newspaper, published a front-page appeal to its readers today for $240,000 to buy new equipment.

The appeal was “the only solution to the enormous crisis faced by the paper as the result of the drastic halving of the copies previously ordered by the Soviet Union,” the newspaper said.

The Morning Star’s Soviet distributor cut in half its daily order of 12,000 copies Dec. 25 after the Kremlin ordered it to meet efficiency guidelines.

The tabloid, which marked its 60th anniversary this month, will lose an estimated $660,000 of its annual income of $2.8 million because of the Soviet cut.

Up to 25 jobs will be cut and the newspaper will be reduced to eight pages from 12 until it can buy better printing equipment, it said.

“A clarion call is going out to all the democratic and progressive forces which the paper has served so long and so faithfully, urging them to come to its aid,” the paper said.

It said the appeal has raised $3,200, half from an employee who had planned to bequeath the money in her will and the other half from a lifelong reader.

The newspaper’s circulation, now at 23,500, peaked in 1947 at 143,000.