A Death and No Tears

Pravda, one of the world’s greatest examples of fake journalism, ceased publication this week and neither Russian journalists nor readers shed a tear.

The newspaper was founded in 1912 by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as the organ of the Communist Party. The word “pravda” means truth, but applied to the party paper it was a misnomer and a reflection of the Communists’ own delusions.

At its peak Pravda published 11 million copies daily, but no one ever confused it with a real newspaper. At the most, the deprived citizens of the Soviet Union would glance at Pravda to try to discern the party line and measure the animosities among party leaders.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, two Greek entrepreneurs arrived in Moscow with the balmy idea that they could turn the discredited publication into a legitimate newspaper, but it proved impossible to shake off 84 years of inertia. The editors, reporters and readers were not there.

Pravda has died a deserving death. But it will live on in the gag earned by its disingenuousness and that of its sister paper Izvestia (“News”): “There is no truth in Pravda and there is no news in Izvestia.” In better days: Pravda being sold on a street in Moscow in 1993.