Newspapers

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NEWSPAPERS

The first news sheet issued with some regularity in Russia was Sankt Peterburgskie vedemosti (St. Petersburg Herald ), a biweekly published by the Imperial Academy of Sciences, beginning in 1727. Until the Great Reforms of 1861–1874, nearly all newspapers in Russia were official bulletins issued by various government institutions. To the extent that there was a print-based public sphere in pre-Reform Russia, it was dominated by the "thick journals" that published literary criticism and philosophical speculation.

The relaxing of censorship and limits on private publications during the Great Reforms, advances in printing technology, and the spread of literacy in Russian cities led to the development of a mass-market, commercial press by the 1880s. Daily papers targeting various markets covered stock-market news and foreign affairs, as well as the more sensational topics of crime, sex scandals, and natural disasters. As Louise McReynolds has demonstrated, Russian commercial mass newspapers resembled their counterparts in North America and Western Europe in appealing to and fostering nationalist sentiment.

By World War I "copeck" (penny) newspapers in Moscow and St. Petersburg achieved circulations comparable to those of mass circulation organs in the United States and Western Europe. The most popular newspaper in the Russian Empire in 1914 was Russkoe slovo (Russian Word ), with a circulation of 619,500.

After the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, they created an entirely new kind of mass press. By the summer of 1918 the Soviet government had shut down all non-Bolshevik newspapers on their territory. Bolshevik newspapers during the years of revolution and civil war (1917–1921) aimed to mobilize the populace in general and Party members in particular for war. Resources were scarce, and typical civil war newspaper editions were only two pages long. The state funded the press throughout the Soviet era.

The Bolsheviks shared with most Russian intellectuals of the revolutionary era a profound contempt for the sensationalistic urban copeck newspapers that aimed to entertain a mass audience. They created a mass press that was supposed to educate, guide, and mobilize readers, not entertain them. Other important functions of Soviet newspapers were the gathering of intelligence on popular moods and the monitoring of corruption in the Party or state apparatus. To fulfill these tasks, the newspapers solicited and received literally millions of readers' letters, some of which were published. The editorial staff also forwarded letters denouncing crime and corruption to the appropriate police or prosecutorial organs. They used letters to compose reports on popular attitudes that were sent to all levels of party officialdom.

The role of direct censorship in Soviet newspaper production has been overemphasized. Agenda-setting by party and state organs was more important. The role of official censors in controlling press content was negligible. Soviet journalists were generally self-censoring, and they followed agendas set by the Communist Party's Central Committee and other official institutions.

Illegal newspapers were central to Bolshevik Party organization in the prerevolutionary years. This heritage of underground political culture contributed to a Soviet fetishization of newspapers as the mass medium par excellance. As a result of this fetishization, Communist propaganda officials and journalists were slow to understand and effectively use the media of radio and television. By the 1970s, Soviet means and methods of mass persuasion and mobilization were far inferior to those developed by advertising agencies and governments in the wealthy liberal democracies.

See also: censorship; izvestiya; journalism; pravda; thick journals