‘Pravda’ for sale in N.Z. soon

Press, 31 May 1986, Page 32

‘Pravda’ for sale in N.Z. soon

By

CHRIS PETERS

NZPA staff correspondent “Pravda,” the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party, has gone on sale in Australia and is expected to hit the streets in New Zealand soon. But the newspaper, reportedly read by 50 million people in the Soviet Union each day, is hardly going to knock the sales of any of its local rivals, judging by the fare in its inaugural Australian edition.

The paper, described as a window on Soviet society, is not exactly pulsing with hot off the press news, featuring instead a report on the problems of growing vegetables in Volgograd as its lead story.

Its report on the Chernobyl atomic power station disaster is consigned to half a dozen paragraphs at the bottom of page two under the headline “Tass report,” acknowledging offers of help and condemning exaggerated foreign reports

of the accident. The edition on sale in Australia is the May 5 anniversary issue, which also commemorates the founding of the newspaper — its name is Russian for Truth — by Vladimir Lenin on May 5, 1912.

Sam Cullen, whose company, Cullen Publications, produces the newspaper in Australia, said that he hoped to have it printed in New Zealand and on sale soon.

He said he was flying across the Tasman to negotiate with prospective printers for the work which he expects to begin at 50,000 copies and settle at 2000 to 3000 a week.

Those who buy it by subscription will get copies of each day’s newspaper, but only one edition a week — usually the “large” eight-page Monday issue — will go on sale at news stands. The Australian edition is, in fact, a copy of that prepared in the United States by Associated Publishers in Minnesota. The Americans’ edition

is the work of a team of Russian language scholars, graphic designers and photocomposition experts who keep the edition as close as possible to the original. Copies of the printers’ plates are sent to Australia for publication, and Mr Cullen said the same system would be used in New Zealand.

The initial print run in Australia was 100,000 but is expected to settie to about 3000 to 4000 a week.

Mr Cullen, a former Liberal Party parliamentary candidate who is printing the newspaper both as a commercial venture and in the belief that New Zealanders and Australians should have the chance to see how the Russians view the world, said “Pravda” not only provided news, but also commentaries, pronouncements, views and direc-

tives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

He said the issue he hoped to launch the paper with in New Zealand con-.

tained several references to the country in its articles.

The sAust2 ($2.58) news stand price of “Pravda” will guarantee that it remains the domain of the dedicated, but if the price is not a deterrent, the content probably will be for those fed on a diet of Westernstyle politics, crime, the latest road carnage, and spiralling inflation.

Its articles have the style of either homilies or heavy lectures expected from a party newspaper, and compared with Western newspapers are distinctly non-sensational. Apart from the vegetables in Volgograd and a commentary on the “Lofty Calling of Journalism,” the newspaper’s front page looks at a factory making motors for chain saws, support for Nicaragua, production at a metal plant in India, and the

city council meeting in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. Other articles include looking at the results of a meeting of people’s deputies in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, Chernobyl, theatre and book reviews, reports from correspondents in Paris and Zimbabwe, and sports reports.

But possibly the clearest window on the Soviet Union was the television and programmes from May 5 — Channel One featured a half-hour report on production quality at the Ryazan Machine Tool Building factory, a television play called “A Russian Pilot,” sport and world reviews, Channel Two’s news was followed by “I Serve the Soviet Union,” and at 8.15 p.m. on Moscow Channel was a quarter-hour programme of ... advertisements.