Mobile Editorial Group

Mobile Editorial Group 

the operative form of the organizational and publicity work of the Soviet press. Mobile editorial groups are established by central, republic, krai, oblast, and city newspapers and are sent to large industrial enterprises, new construction projects, sovkhozes, and kolkhozes to work with the local Party organizations in the struggle to raise output and the quality of production, to in-crease productive labor, and to put reserves of production to the fullest use.

A mobile editorial group, in close cooperattion with the local press organ, puts out a small newspaper for all the people at the enterprise in question, reviewing the less productive sections, activating socialist competition of the collectives of the shops, shifts, and brigades, and publicizing progressive results. The mobile editorial group directs worker-correspondent inspections, social reviews, and competitions; publishes extras, leaflets, and posters; and helps the editorial boards of the wall newspapers. The mobile editorial group also reports to its principal newspaper, illuminating the work of the enterprise and raising questions of production that cannot be solved locally.

Mobile editorial groups originated in the first years of the country’s industrialization. During the first five-year plans, at various times, the mobile editorial groups of Pravda, Izvestiia, and Komsomol’skaia pravda and of many republic and oblast newspapers worked on almost all major construction sites and at leading factories (the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, the Kirov Factory in Leningrad, and at Dneprostroi and Magnitostroi, for example). The mobile editorial groups of the Krest’ianskaia gazeta and the republic, krai, and oblast press performed great services in the period of the collectivization of agriculture and during the sowing and harvesting campaigns.

During the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45, central and local newspapers relied heavily on mobile editorial groups to inspire greater efforts of labor on behalf of the front. Pravda’s mobile editorial groups published newspapers under the title Vse dlia fronta! (Everything for the Front!) in aviation factories; at the Moscow Automobile Plant; at the Shatura peat plants; in the Karaganda mines; in the mines restored from ruins in the Moscow and Donets coalfields; and at Dneproges, Azovstal’, and Zaporozhstal’. The oblast newspapers of the Urals and Siberia, among others, sent mobile editorial groups to defense factories, kolkhozes during agricultural campaigns, and so on.

In the postwar years the central and local press has sent mobile editorial groups to the most important areas of Communist construction. In 1963, Pravda’s mobile editorial group published the newspaper Ogni Eniseia on the construction site of the Krasnoiarsk Hydroelectric Power Plant. In the summer of 1970 it published the newspaper Pravda na Kondopoge at the Kondopog Cellulose and Paper Combine. Izvestiia’s mobile editorial group put out a newspaper at the construction site of the Cheliabinsk Metallurgical Plant and at enterprises of the paper industry. Mobile editorial groups from Literaturnaia gazeta were sent out to cellulose and paper combines.

A. V. GREBNEV