Truth Is 33 Years Old

In the Soviet Union, where most institutions are new, Pravda ("Truth") is one of the oldest (33 years). Last week the official daily organ of the Communist Party printed its 10,000th issue (and its first six-page number since wartime shortages cut it to four pages).

Two of its three founders (see cut) are alive and doing well. Pravda's first managing editor, Viacheslav Molotov, went to work under Nikolai Lenin's decree: the press was to be "propagandist, agitator and organizer." It still is, although Pravda has long since changed from agitating agin the Government to agitating for, Another Pravda founder, Joseph Stalin, sees to that. It is also intensely nationalist, devotes scant space to news from outside Russia. (It was a day late reporting the Jap surrender.)

From an average 40,000 circulation in its first, precarious years (when it led the Tsar's police an underground chase), Pravda grew to 3,000,000 before World War II. Lately the print order has been around 2,000,000 (about the same as the biggest seller in the U.S., the nationalist tabloid New York Daily News), could easily rise to three times that--if Pravda could only get more paper. Price: 20 kopecks (about 4-c-).

Pravda is printed on 21 rotary presses (mostly U.S.-made) in a bright, airy plant as big as two Manhattan city blocks, hits the Moscow newsstands in midmorning, along with the other two of the Big Three, the Government's official Izvestia and the Army's Red Star. Other Pravda editions are printed (from mats delivered by plane) the same day in Leningrad and Kuibyshev, the following day in Baku and Rostov.

Combat Journalism. Pravda has not mellowed with age. For the 10,000th issue its dour, bald, 66-year-old editor, David Iosifovich Zaslavsky (who that day received the Order of the Patriotic War, First Class) wrote another lecture on freedom of the press:

"What some countries of the West call freedom of the press is nothing but a rope on which a capitalist publisher keeps his journalists. If the rope is long enough, freedom of speech is relatively long. If the rope is short freedom of speech is short-cropped.

"Hearst,* for instance, sometimes gives his pen hoodlums full freedom, releasing them from their chains in order to freely assault the Soviet people.

"The Soviet reporter is free because no exterior opinions can influence him. The Soviet journalist is an official worker. He gets wages for his work, but he does not work for money. . . . Abroad the journalist's profession is a career. With us it is a combat post."

Such talk moved the New York Times's tart Columnist Simeon Strunsky to remark: "Perhaps . . . Pravda will better understand what we mean by freedom of the press if we say it is a state of things, roughly speaking, in which Lenin [for five years, even with interruptions], could publish a Bolshevist newspaper in St.

Petersburg under Nicholas II."

* A familiar name to Pravda readers, usually characterized more fully by Zaslavsky as "idiot" or "newspaper gangster."

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