Pravda Publishing House

Pravda Publishing House 

the oldest party publishing house in the USSR. Located in Moscow, the publishing house is directly connected with the newspaper Pravda, founded in 1912, and the propaganda work of the Communist Party. It has its own printing plant—the V. I. Lenin Printing House of the Newspaper Pravda.

The publishing house specializes in the publication of newspapers and magazines. In 1974 it issued all the newspapers of the Central Committee of the CPSU, including Pravda (10.3 million circulation), Sovetskaia Rossiia (2.6 million), Sel’skaia zhizn’ (Village Life, 7.7 million), Sotsialisticheskaia industriia (Socialist Industry, 850,000), Sovetskaia kul’tura (Soviet Culture, 450,000), Ekonomicheskaia gazeta (Economic Gazette, 850,000), Komsomol’skaia pravda (Komsomol Pravda, 9.4 million), the organ of the Central Committee of the Komsomol, and the weekly Za rubezhom (Abroad, 1 million).

To assure rapid delivery of the main newspapers to readers in remote areas, the printing process has been decentralized. Either the pages of the newspapers are transmitted by phototelegraphy (21 reception terminals in 1974), or matrices are delivered by plane and the newspapers printed from them on local presses.

The Pravda Publishing House publishes all the political magazines of the Central Committee of the CPSU: Kommunist, Partiinaia zhizn’ (Party Life), Agitator, and Politicheskoe samoobrazovanie(Political Self-education). It also issues the scholarly and theoretical journals Voprosy filosofii (Problems of Philosophy), Voprosy ekonomiki (Problems of Economics), Voprosy istorii (Problems of History), and Voprosy istorii KPSS (Problems of CPSU History); the social and political popular illustrated magazines Ogonek (Little Light), Rabotnitsa (Working Woman), Krest’ianka (Peasant Woman), Sovetskaia zhenshchina (Soviet Woman, in 12 languages), and Sovetskii Soiuz (Soviet Union, in 19 languages); the popular-science magazines Nauka i zhizn’ (Science and Life) and Zdorov’e (Health); and the satirical magazine Krokodil. The 32 magazines published by the Pravda Publishing House have a total circulation of 56 million copies.

In addition to newspapers and magazines the publishing house issues annually more than 20 million books and pamphlets, more than 50 million postcards, and 3 million reproductions. Its publications are distributed in 102 foreign countries.

B. A. FEL’DMAN