Pravda

Lore & Background

After the Soviet Union fell, Boris Yeltsin sold Pravda to a Greek business family in 1992, putting it under the control of their company, Pravda International. A conflict in 1996 between Pravda International’s owners and some of the newspaper’s journalists caused Pravda to split.

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation took over the print Pravda, while a group of former Soviet Pravda journalists founded Russia’s first online newspaper, Pravda Online, which later became Pravda.ru and has no link to the Communist Party. The print Pravda remains with the CPRF, and Pravda.ru is privately owned, with international editions in Russian, English, French, and Portuguese. After a legal fight, a Russian arbitration court ruled that both sides could keep using the Pravda name.

Reader's Guide

Origins Pre-revolutionary Pravda Though Pravda officially began publication on 5 May 1912 (22 April 1912 OS), the anniversary of Karl Marx's birth, its origins trace back to 1903 when it was founded in Moscow by a wealthy railway engineer, V.A. Kozhevnikov. Pravda had started publishing in the light of the Russian Revolution of 1905. During its earliest days, Pravda had no political orientation. Kozhevnikov started it as a journal of arts, literature and social life. Kozhevnikov was soon able to form up a team of young writers including A.A. Bogdanov, N.A Rozhkov, M.N Pokrovsky, I.I Skvortsov-Stepanov, P.P Rumyantsev and M.G. Lunts, who were active contributors on 'social life' section of Pravda.

Later, they became the editorial board of the journal, and, in the near future, also became the active members of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). Because of certain quarrels between Kozhevnikov and the editorial board, he had asked them to leave and the Menshevik faction of the RSDLP took over as the editorial board. But the relationship between them and Kozhevnikov was also a bitter one. The Ukrainian political party Spilka, which was also a splinter group of the RSDLP, took over the journal as its organ. Leon Trotsky was invited to edit the paper in 1908, and the paper was moved to Vienna in 1909.

By then, the editorial board of Pravda consisted of hard-line Bolsheviks who sidelined the Spilka leadership soon after it shifted to Vienna. Trotsky had introduced a tabloid format to the newspaper and distanced itself from the intra-party struggles inside the RSDLP. During those days, Pravda gained a large audience among Russian workers. By 1910, the Central Committee of the RSDLP suggested making Pravda its official organ. At the sixth conference of the RSDLP held in Prague in January 1912, the Menshevik faction was expelled from the party.

The party under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin decided to make Pravda its official party organ. The paper was shifted from Vienna to St. Petersburg and the first issue under Lenin's leadership was published on 5 May 1912 (22 April 1912 OS). It was the first time that Pravda was published as a legal political newspaper. The Central Committee of the RSDLP, workers and individuals such as Maxim Gorky provided financial help to the newspaper.

Did You Know?

• Pravda was closed down by tsarist authorities in July 1914 and changed its name eight times over the next three years due to police harassment.