Soviet newspapers

Contrary to the popular belief in the West, there was a lot of them, and not just Pravda. And they were different from each other, too.

The first newspaper (or was it rather a magazine?) that I remember seeing at home was Bloknot Agitatora ("Agitator's notebook"). It was very soft and had just the right page size, and therefore was immensely popular. The print didn't come off easily, either, which was also an advantage. The paper did not contain any actual news and therefore it wasn't read before use, but it made tolerable bathroom reading if you needed one.

In general the popularity of newspapers in Soviet Union was much boosted by general unavailabilty of toilet paper. We sometimes got some because the disabled WWII veterans were entitled to it every once in a while, and our grandpa was one. We did not get it often because there was a lot of us and only one disabled veteran, and even Soviet authorities were intelligent enough to figure out that one disabled war veteran had only one ass to wipe in the overwhelming majority of the cases. Later, the disabled veterans of the Afghanistan war were entitled to the same privileges, and I am sure there was much agonizing in the ranks of the authorities as to how to declare those people war veterans without actually declaring the event (whose official name was "friendly aid to the brotherly people of Afghanistan" or something along those lines) a war, but they managed it somehow.

Pravda ("Truth") was not very popular due to boring writing and coarse paper. Leningradskaya Pravda ("Leningrad truth") had a somewhat less coarse paper and some local news and TV program listings.

At some point the publishers of Bloknot Agitatora made a tragic mistake, changing the format to a larger one and the paper to the kind that lost even to Pravda. The popularity of the paper fell dramatically, and we had to find a new one. We chose Sovetskaya Rossiya ("Soviet Russia"), a publication with fairly soft paper. The format was rather inconvenient - a regular large newspaper - and it took some work to cut up. Besides, the print came off very easily and if you were not careful you ended up with the portrait of the Leader of the World Revolution on your ass. It was, however, fairly easy to get rid off, unlike the actual Leader of the World Revolution, whose mummy is still on display in the Mausoleum.

One of my grandmothers used to get Literaturnaya Gazeta ("Literary Newspaper"), which was widely reputed to be a KGB publication and contained some literary rumors and, unlike most others, had some intentional humor. Its ass-wiping properties were average.

Content was generally a problem. There were foreign news, but they were limited both in nature and in size. Internal politial news and election campaigns were quite rare due to the fact that there was only one candidate for each election, who usually mercifully kept his or her campaign to a minimum. You couldn't report bad news, usually, although sometimes you could. You could report good news, but there usually wasn't any. No advertisement, either, since you don't need to advertise in a place where the population is always trying to buy everything it can and a lot of things it cannot.

They wrote about politicians, about the success of some kolkhoz, about the failure of another, about the evil intentions of some film director whose movies were never shown in Russia anyway, about an earthquake somewhere across the world. Sublte people could read the articles between the lines and deduce some plans of the authorities. Subtlety is unfortunately not one of my virtues, and I have failed to learn to read between the lines although both my parents were proficient at it and tried to teach me. So I did not really find any content in the newspapers until the mid-eighties, when they suddenly started to write how exactly everything is Jews' fault, which for some reason was an interesting topic from my point of view, but by that time you really did not need to be subtle to understand what it was all about.

My parents' skill has impressed me the most when on April 29 (or was it 30?), 1986, they read a two- or three-line note about a small accident in Chernobyl in Sovetskaya Rossiya and told me that the accident must've been fucking huge. I did not quite believe them until I went to a newspaper kiosk and found that all the foreign newspapers, which at that time consisted of East Block newspapers and several Communist newpapers from the West, have disappeared, both from this kiosk and from all the others that I checked. Some foreign newspapers tended to diasppear for a few days every time something big happened in Russia, but the extent of this disappearance was so unusual that that it registered very strongly even on my rather coarse weird-newspaper-shit-meter, and I figured parents were right after all.

An amusing change from Leningrad's newspapers were the papers we read on vacation in Abkhazia. They were full of local social news, and the main social news was a list of locals who got convicted for one crime or another that day, with the description of the person, the crime and the sentence. There was so many of them that I still wonder how come some of the population was running free in the streets.