---
title: Pravda, Izvestia and TASS:the institutional structure of the Soviet press monopoly, 1912-1991
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/pravda-tass-soviet-press-institution/
description: the Bolsheviks inherited one illegal party paper (Pravda, 1912) and one soviet-born paper that became the government's own (Izvestia, 1917), centralised…
section: Case studies
---

![Illustration: an interwar radio-and-newsreel intelligence collage with a 1930s map of Europe and propaganda poster proofs.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-interwar.jpg)

[Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/)

# Pravda, Izvestia and TASS:the institutional structure of the Soviet press monopoly, 1912-1991

At a glance

The Bolsheviks inherited one illegal party paper (Pravda, 1912) and one soviet-born paper that became the government's own (Izvestia, 1917), centralised the country's wire service into a single agency (ROSTA…

- **When:** July 10, 1925
- **Actor:** The Bolshevik party, then the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: the Politburo and the Central…
- **Target:** Soviet newspaper readers, and, through TASS wire copy, the foreign press that quoted Soviet…
- **Source:** Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures
- **Techniques:** [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/) [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/) [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/) [Plain folks](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/plain-folks/) [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/) [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/)
- **Regime:** [Soviet Union under Stalin](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/soviet-union/)

Full details

- **Actor:** The Bolshevik party, then the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: the Politburo and the Central Committee's Department of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop); Pravda (the party's own paper) and Izvestia (the Soviet government's paper); the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) and its successor TASS, the sole domestic wire service; the pre-publication censor Glavlit
- **Target:** Soviet newspaper readers, and, through TASS wire copy, the foreign press that quoted Soviet statements

On this page

- [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/pravda-tass-soviet-press-institution/#what-happened)
- [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/pravda-tass-soviet-press-institution/#how-it-works)
- [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/pravda-tass-soviet-press-institution/#then-and-now)
- [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/pravda-tass-soviet-press-institution/#positions-on-the-record)
- [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/pravda-tass-soviet-press-institution/#same-method-test)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/pravda-tass-soviet-press-institution/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/pravda-tass-soviet-press-institution/#images)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/pravda-tass-soviet-press-institution/#sources)

On this page

**Content note:** this page describes the 1924 murder of a village correspondent and the 1937-38 arrest and execution of a national newspaper editor as part of the Soviet purges.

**In one line:** the Bolsheviks inherited one illegal party paper (*Pravda*, 1912) and one soviet-born paper that became the government's own (*Izvestia*, 1917), centralised the country's wire service into a single agency (ROSTA, then from 1925 TASS), set the daily line through a Central Committee department that could hire and fire every editor, built a mobilised corps of "worker and peasant correspondents" to supply the appearance of a grassroots press, and reprinted the result in thousands of local papers under their own mastheads until the 1990 press law ended censorship and the 1991 collapse ended the state that ran it.

![Diagram: Pravda and Izvestia founded separately in 1912 and 1917, ROSTA and then TASS centralise the wire, the Central Committee's Agitprop department and the nomenklatura set the daily line for every editor, a mobilised rabkor/selkor movement supplies a grassroots press, thousands of local papers carry the same line through the Soyuzpechat distribution monopoly, and the system ends with the 1990 press law and the 1991 collapse](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/pravda-tass-soviet-press-institution-diagram.svg)

## What happened

**Two founding papers**

- **5 May 1912 (22 April Old Style), St Petersburg.** *Pravda* ("Truth") publishes its first issue as a legal daily, launched on Lenin's initiative after the Bolsheviks, at their January 1912 Prague conference, decided to convert the thrice-weekly paper *Zvezda* into a daily under a new name. Tsarist police repeatedly shut it down; it reappeared under other names each time. 5 May is still marked in Russia as Press Day.
- **28 February 1917 (13 March N.S.), Petrograd.** *Izvestia* ("News") is first published as the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, formed during the February Revolution; its early editorial board is Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary.
- **27 October 1917 (9 November N.S.).** After the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, control of *Izvestia* passes to the Bolsheviks and it becomes the official organ of the new Soviet government; its main offices move to Moscow. *Pravda* becomes the party's own paper on the same terms. The resulting division, party paper and government paper, each nominally separate, produced a well-known Soviet joke: "there is no truth (*pravda*) in the *News*, and no news (*izvestia*) in the *Truth*" — quoted in English as early as a Pittsburgh newspaper letter of September 1934.
- **Growth.** *Izvestia*'s circulation is given as 354,000 in 1924 and 1,500,000 by 1932. *Pravda* remained the Communist Party's central organ from 1918 to 1991; the party's youth paper, *Komsomolskaya Pravda* (founded 1925), and its trade-union paper, *Trud*, extended the family of central titles.

**The wire is centralised**

- **7 September 1918.** A Sovnarkom decree merges the old Petrograd Telegraph Agency and the Union of Journalists' press bureau into the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA), subordinate to the Soviet executive VTsIK and tasked with distributing official announcements nationwide by telegraph. (ROSTA's parallel role running the hand-stencilled "Windows" street-poster campaign of 1919-21 is covered on FRAME's [Bolshevik agitprop, 1917-1921: soviets, decrees, agit-trains and the ROSTA windows](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/bolshevik-1917-agitprop/) page and is not repeated here.)
- **Winter 1921-22.** As the party's press apparatus matures under the New Economic Policy, a newly formed Press Section inside the Central Committee's Agitprop department takes over supervision of the provincial press, and ROSTA is narrowed to wire-service functions (Kenez, 1985).
- **10 July 1925.** The Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) is founded, under the joint oversight of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and Sovnarkom, as the central agency for collecting and distributing both internal and international news to every Soviet newspaper, radio station and, later, television station. In March 1935 ROSTA, which had continued running as the news agency of the Russian republic (RSFSR) specifically, is formally liquidated and its functions folded into TASS.
- **30 March 1934.** TASS first uses the formula "*TASS upolnomochen zayavit*" — "TASS is authorized to state" — to mark a pronouncement as coming from the top of the state rather than as an ordinary wire report; the phrase became the standard signal, through to the Soviet collapse, that a statement carried the government's own authority.
- **1961.** The Novosti Press Agency (APN) is created, formally as a non-government association of the journalists', writers' and friendship societies, to succeed Sovinformburo's peacetime foreign-outreach role (Sovinformburo's wartime operation is covered on FRAME's [Soviet wartime propaganda, 1939-1945: Sovinformburo, Agitprop and the Red Army press](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/soviet-wartime-propaganda/) page) and to supply softer, human-interest material about the USSR abroad. TASS kept the domestic wire and the monopoly on officially authorized statements; APN never had that authority, and its separate, nominally independent legal form was itself a piece of stagecraft for foreign audiences.

**The daily line: Politburo to editors**

- **Agitprop's directives.** The Central Committee's Department of Agitation and Propaganda, formed in 1920 (see [Bolshevik agitprop, 1917-1921: soviets, decrees, agit-trains and the ROSTA windows](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/bolshevik-1917-agitprop/)), set themes, anniversaries and campaign priorities for the whole press through circulars, conferences and instructors sent to provincial editors; central editors dealt with the department, and through it with the Politburo, directly. Matthew Lenoe's *Closer to the Masses* (Harvard, 2004) traces how, under this pressure, journalists in the late 1920s built the master narrative of industrialisation and purge that became the core of Stalinist public culture.
- **Nomenklatura appointment.** Every editor of a party or state paper, from *Pravda*'s down to a district paper's, held a post on the corresponding party committee's nomenklatura list — the Central Committee Secretariat's for the central papers, an obkom's for a regional paper, a raikom's for a district one — meaning the post could not be filled or vacated without that committee's approval. Editorial independence from the party was not a possible position to hold; it was not on the list of jobs the system recognised.
- **Glavlit's separate check.** Beneath the editorial chain, the censorship office Glavlit (from 1922) read every page, including TASS wire copy, before it went to press. Its list of forbidden subjects, its closed library collections, and its later retouching of the published photographic record are covered in full on FRAME's [Glavlit and the retouched photographic record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/soviet-glavlit-photo-retouching/) page and are only noted here as the floor beneath the editorial structure above.
- **Bukharin, editor twice over.** Nikolai Bukharin edited *Pravda* from 1918 until 1929, when his defeat as leader of the party's "Right Opposition" cost him the post along with his seats on the Politburo and in the Comintern. From 1934 to 1936, in a period of relative moderation, he edited *Izvestia*, where he wrote repeatedly about the danger of European fascism. He was arrested in February 1937, tried in the third Moscow show trial (see FRAME's [The Moscow show trials: confession, spectacle and consent (1936-1938)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/moscow-show-trials-1936-1938/)) and shot in March 1938 — the clearest case of an editor's career ending inside the same purges his own paper had been made to report.

![Muscovites reading Izvestia at an outdoor newsstand near the paper's editorial building on Pushkinskaya Square, Moscow, 2 January 1935](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/pravda-tass-soviet-press-institution-izvestia-1935.jpg)

*Readers at an*Izvestia*newsstand on Pushkinskaya Square, Moscow, 2 January 1935, near the paper's own constructivist editorial and printing building (completed 1927, architect Grigory Barkhin). Photo: Boris Vdovenko, Moscow Main Archive, CC BY 4.0.*

**Rabkor and selkor: a built grassroots**

- **From 1919.** Lenin has the *Pravda* editorial board organise a network of "worker correspondents" (*rabkory*), ordinary readers who would write in regularly; the aim, as officials described it, was to expose corrupt local officials, report on popular moods and mobilise opinion behind the party. Peasant correspondents (*selkory*) are added from 1924, and by the mid-1920s all the high-circulation Soviet papers ran a regular corps of them.
- **March 1924: Dymovka.** A *selkor* named Grigori Malinovsky, in the village of Dymovka in the Nikolaev region of Ukraine, is murdered after sending in a report accusing two local officials of bribery and intimidation. That October the Bolshevik official Lev Sosnovsky travels to Nikolaev to speak for the prosecution at the trial of six men accused of the killing; three are executed. In a *Pravda* article that November, Sosnovsky writes that "Dymovka is not an exceptional phenomenon" and frames the murder as an episode in the class struggle between poor peasants and richer ones (*kulaks*). The publicity around the case is followed, in the seventeen months to August 1925, by *selkor* numbers growing from about 15,000 to 115,000.
- **Scale.** By 1926, at the Third All-Union Congress of Worker and Peasant Correspondents, Leon Trotsky addressed 580 delegates representing a movement of roughly 500,000 *rabkory* and *selkory*. At the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, Stalin put the number at more than 3 million. Historians who have studied the movement's membership find a high proportion were themselves low-level party officials, trade-union activists or factory managers, rather than the unaffiliated workers and peasants the movement's name and coverage implied.

**Thousands of local papers, one line**

- **Structure.** Below the two all-Union papers, the Soviet press ran through republic-level titles, then regional (*oblast*) papers, then district (*raion*) papers and factory or collective-farm wall newspapers, each level drawing its national and foreign news from TASS and its campaign themes from Agitprop, while contributing its own local coverage inside the same boundaries.
- **Soyuzpechat.** Formed in 1930 under the Ministry of Communications, Soyuzpechat held the sole subscription and retail monopoly for periodicals across the USSR. At its 1980s peak it ran 833 shops, about 37,700 newsstands and kiosks and 9,900 vending machines, and took subscriptions through the Soviet Union's roughly 47,000 post offices as well as its own branches.
- **Scale by the end.** In 1988 the Soviet press comprised more than 8,000 daily newspapers in about sixty languages, with a combined circulation of roughly 170 million; close to 3,000 titles appeared in non-Russian languages, though minority-language papers accounted for only about a quarter of total circulation against a non-Russian population share of nearly half. The party-run Union of Journalists had close to 74,000 members that year, about 80 per cent of them party members.

**Purges, then the end**

- **12 June 1990.** Mikhail Gorbachev signs the USSR Law "On the Press and Other Mass Media," in force from 1 August 1990, whose Article 1 states that censorship of the mass media is not permitted; Glavlit is wound down and replaced by a narrower body, GUOT (see [Glavlit and the retouched photographic record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/soviet-glavlit-photo-retouching/) for the detail).
- **1991.** The Soviet state, and the party apparatus that had run Agitprop, the nomenklatura and TASS's authorization, ends with it. *Pravda* and *Izvestia* both continue publishing into the post-Soviet period, now under private and, later, state-linked commercial ownership rather than as organs of a ruling party and government; TASS, renamed ITAR-TASS in the 1990s, reverted to the plain name TASS in 2014.

![The former Pravda editorial and printing building on Pravdy Street, Moscow, photographed in 2016, by then standing empty](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/pravda-tass-soviet-press-institution-pravda-building-2016.jpg)

*The Pravda building on Pravdy Street, Moscow (architect Panteleimon Golosov; editorial building completed 1937), photographed in 2016, when the newspaper's former premises stood largely empty. Photo: Gennady Grachev, CC BY 2.0.*

## How it works

- [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/): two papers with different names, "the party's" and "the government's," carried by design the same editorial line, set by the same Agitprop department and cleared by the same Glavlit censors; a reader who checked *Pravda* against *Izvestia* found agreement that looked like independent confirmation rather than one line stated twice. The same structure repeated itself at every level below them: a republic paper, an *oblast* paper and a district paper covering the same anniversary campaign in the same week were not three newsrooms reaching the same judgement, they were one campaign calendar reprinted three times.
- [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/): TASS's wire copy reached readers, and foreign correspondents, as news-agency reporting rather than as a party or government statement, even where it originated as one; the "TASS is authorized to state" formula (from 1934) made this explicit for the most sensitive statements, but the great majority of ordinary TASS copy carried no such label and read as routine wire-service output.
- [Plain folks](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/plain-folks/) and [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/): the *rabkor*/*selkor* movement was presented, in its own coverage and in official figures reaching into the millions by 1934, as ordinary workers and peasants writing to their own papers; the movement's real composition, heavy with local officials and activists, and its top-down organisation from Lenin's 1919 instruction onward, sit behind the "grassroots" framing rather than inside it.
- [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/): nomenklatura appointment made an editor's job depend on the same party committee that set the line, so that editing against the line and losing the job for disloyalty were not two different risks but one. Bukharin's own trajectory, from *Pravda*'s editor to a defendant in the trial his own former paper reported, is the clearest instance in the record used here.
- [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/): because TASS was the only authorised domestic source for national and international news, a Soviet reader had no second wire service to check a TASS release against; the "remaining pile" a reader could assemble from the Soviet press was, structurally, whatever TASS and Agitprop had already decided to put in it.

**Colour.** The system described here was, on its own terms, **white**: *Pravda*, *Izvestia* and TASS all spoke openly as the party's paper, the government's paper and the state wire service, with no concealment of who ran them. What the reader could not see directly was the process behind the agreement between them, the Agitprop directive, the nomenklatura appointment and the Glavlit check, which is closer to a structural form of **gray**: independent-looking outlets converging on one source without the convergence itself being disclosed.

## Then and now

![The TASS building on Tverskoy Boulevard, Moscow, photographed in 2024](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/pravda-tass-soviet-press-institution-tass-building-2024.jpg)

*The TASS building on Tverskoy Boulevard, Moscow (built 1970-77), photographed in 2024; TASS still operates from it as Russia's state news agency. Photo: MBH, CC BY-SA 4.0.*

Neither TASS nor *Izvestia* disappeared with the Soviet Union. TASS spent the 1990s and 2000s as ITAR-TASS before formally reverting, in 2014, to the plain Soviet-era name TASS; *Izvestia* is now held by the National Media Group, a media holding with ties to figures close to the Russian state. The clearest modern echo of the structure this page describes is not a rebranding but the events of early March 2022, after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine: on 3 March the independent radio station Echo Moskvy was shut down, and within days a new law criminalising "knowingly false information" about the Russian armed forces, punishable by up to fifteen years, drove the country's last independent outlets — the newspaper *Novaya Gazeta*, the television channel TV Rain, the website *Meduza* — off the air, offline or out of the country. The result, by April 2022, was again a press with effectively one authorised voice, in which TASS and its state-media counterparts supply the news the shrunken domestic press repeats. The differences from the Soviet system are real. The 2022 closures ran through courts, a media regulator (Roskomnadzor) and a criminal law rather than through nomenklatura appointment and a standing censorship office; the outlets closed were themselves creatures of the post-1991 period, not organs the state had always owned; and readers who lost *Novaya Gazeta* or *Meduza* in print could, unlike a Soviet reader losing a *rabkor*'s letter, still often reach them online through a VPN, a scale of workaround the Soviet system never had to contend with. What repeats is the underlying logic: when the channels that could contradict the state's own account close, one source (there, TASS wire copy under Agitprop's line; here, TASS and its state-media counterparts under the 2022 wartime-information law) again supplies what counts as news.

## Positions on the record

- **The Soviet state's own rationale.** Lenin's 1902 pamphlet *What Is to Be Done?* set out the underlying theory before the state existed to apply it: "A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser," comparable to "the scaffolding erected round a building under construction." On this view a unified press was not a departure from journalism's purpose but the fulfilment of it: organising the class, not refereeing between competing accounts, was the paper's job. The 1936 Constitution's Article 125 guaranteed citizens "freedom of the press," but conditioned it on use "in conformity with the interests of the working people and in order to strengthen the socialist system," and placed the material means of publishing (print shops, paper stocks) "at the disposal of the working people and their organisations" — meaning the state and party bodies that already controlled them, not private owners.
- **Contemporaries.** Leonid Vladimirov, the Soviet journalist who defected to Britain in 1966, described the Glavlit censor's list from the inside in a 1972 *Index on Censorship* article (see [Glavlit and the retouched photographic record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/soviet-glavlit-photo-retouching/)); no equivalent insider account of the Agitprop press-directive system from this period is used on this page. Sosnovsky's own November 1924 *Pravda* article on the Dymovka murder is itself part of the official record it describes, a state journalist writing up a killing that followed from the state's own correspondent programme.
- **Later historians.** Peter Kenez's *The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929* (Cambridge, 1985) traces the press apparatus described here from ROSTA's founding through the Agitprop reorganisation of the early 1920s. Matthew Lenoe's *Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers* (Harvard, 2004) follows the same institutions into the First Five-Year Plan, arguing that the pressure on journalists to mobilise society for industrialisation, more than any single directive, shaped the narrative style that became Stalinist public culture. Jeffrey Brooks's *Thank You, Comrade Stalin!* (Princeton, 2000) covers the wartime and postwar press this page does not (see [Soviet wartime propaganda, 1939-1945: Sovinformburo, Agitprop and the Red Army press](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/soviet-wartime-propaganda/)).
- **This archive's reading.** Documented: the founding dates and institutional facts above; the nomenklatura mechanism for editorial appointment; the *rabkor*/*selkor* movement's scale and the Dymovka case; Bukharin's two editorships and his arrest, trial and execution; the 1990 press law and the post-Soviet continuation of TASS and *Izvestia* under new ownership. **Not shown** in the sources used here: an exact count of how many individual editorial decisions across seventy years of this system were made under direct instruction versus by an editor's own anticipation of what the line would be (both mechanisms are documented separately, but no source used here quantifies their relative weight); and how many *rabkor* or *selkor* reports were genuine local journalism that happened to fit the campaign calendar, as against reports commissioned to fit it. The system's boundaries are well documented; what individual journalists inside it chose to do within those boundaries is not uniformly so.

## Same-method test

- **Nazi Germany: the DNB.** The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda's Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, formed on 5 December 1933 by merging Germany's two largest private news agencies (Wolff's Telegraphisches Bureau and the Telegraphen-Union) and issuing its first reports on 1 January 1934, gave German newspapers a single controlled source for national and foreign news in much the way TASS did for Soviet ones (see [The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, 1933-1945](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/reich-propaganda-ministry/)). The comparison is closer for the wire than for the rest of the system: the RMVP also ran a daily press conference from 1 July 1933, at which named journalists received the day's specific instructions on what to report and how; no equivalent standing daily meeting between the Soviet leadership and editors is documented in the sources used on this page, whose control ran instead through nomenklatura appointment, written Agitprop directives and Glavlit's line-by-line check. The Soviet wire monopoly also took eight years to build, from ROSTA's 1918 founding to TASS's 1925 charter, inside a state that was already one-party from the start; the DNB was created by forced merger within the Nazi government's first year in power, folding two previously independent, competing agencies into one.
- **Maoist China: Xinhua.** The Chinese Communist Party's own wire service traces to the Red China News Agency, founded in the Jiangxi Soviet in November 1931 (see FRAME's [Divide the land, label the enemy: propaganda and discipline in the Jiangxi Soviet (1927-1934)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/ccp-jiangxi-soviet-propaganda-1927-1934/)) and renamed Xinhua at the end of the Long March in 1935. After the 1949 founding of the People's Republic, Xinhua absorbed the assets of the old Nationalist government's Central News Agency and became the sole official state news agency, taking content directives from the party's Central Propaganda Department in a structure that maps closely onto TASS and Agitprop: one authorised domestic wire, one central directing department, editors and bureau chiefs who answer to the party apparatus rather than to a private proprietor. Reporters Without Borders, in a 2018 report, still described Xinhua as "the linchpin of control of the Chinese media" decades later. The Soviet and Chinese cases differ in one structural respect worth noting: Xinhua was founded by a revolutionary movement years before it held state power and only became the state's sole wire service after 1949, whereas TASS was built by a party that had already taken state power in 1917, inside an existing capital rather than a rural base area.

## How to spot it

- When two nominally separate outlets never disagree, ask what they draw from in common before treating their agreement as independent confirmation.
- Check who appoints the editor and who can remove them. Where the answer is a political body rather than a proprietor or a board, editorial independence is not something the appointment allows for, whatever the paper's own self-description says.
- A phrase that marks a statement as specially authorised — "TASS is authorized to state," or its equivalents elsewhere — is a claim about rank, not about truth; the more emphatic the framing, the more worth checking against a source outside the same system.
- Movements presented as spontaneous and grassroots are worth asking who organised them, on whose instruction, and what happened to a member who reported something inconvenient; the Dymovka case shows both the organising and the cost in one episode.
- When one wire service supplies the copy that other outlets, domestic and sometimes foreign, then run, a second outlet repeating the same fact is not necessarily a second source for it.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from this page's sourced facts (`make_diagrams.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME |
| Readers at an *Izvestia* newsstand, Pushkinskaya Square, Moscow, 2 January 1935 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Izvestia_building_in_January_1935.jpg), Moscow Main Archive, photo Boris Vdovenko | CC BY 4.0 |
| The Pravda building, Pravdy Street, Moscow, 2016 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moscow,_Pravda_Building_(30387276273).jpg) (via Flickr), photo Gennady Grachev | CC BY 2.0 |
| The TASS building, Tverskoy Boulevard, Moscow, 2024 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TASS_building_01.jpg), photo MBH | CC BY-SA 4.0 |

### Image gaps

- **First issues of *Pravda* (5 May 1912) or *Izvestia* (28 February 1917).** No openly licensed scan of either front page was confirmed in this pass.
- **A photograph of the *Pravda* print works.** A 1959 RIA Novosti photograph of a quality inspector at the *Pravda* printing plant (archive #360321) carries a CC BY-SA 3.0 tag on Commons, matching the licence used for RIA Novosti photographs elsewhere in this archive, but Commons' API rate-limited repeated requests from the build environment before the file could be downloaded. **This gap can probably be filled.**
- **A portrait of Bukharin as an editor, or of any other purged Soviet editor.** No openly licensed photograph specific to an editorial role, rather than a general political portrait, was confirmed in this pass.
- **The Soyuzpechat kiosk network.** No openly licensed photograph of a Soyuzpechat newsstand or vending point was found in the time available.
- **The Central Committee's Agitprop directives to editors, or a TASS "authorized to state" bulletin as originally printed.** These are held in Russian state and press archives (RGASPI; TASS's own archive) and were not found digitised under an open licence.

## Sources

- [Britannica, "Pravda"](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pravda)
- [Presidential Library (prlib.ru), "The first issue of 'Pravda' newspaper published"](https://www.prlib.ru/en/history/619220)
- [Left Voice, "Lenin and the Newspaper (I): The Iskra Period"](https://www.leftvoice.org/lenin-and-the-newspaper-i-the-iskra-period/); V. I. Lenin, *What Is to Be Done?* (1902), section on "A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist..." via [Marxists Internet Archive](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/v.htm)
- [Britannica, "Izvestiya"](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Izvestiya)
- [The Moscow Times, "Izvestia at 100: A Russian Century Through the Lens of the Top Soviet Newspaper"](https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2017/03/13/rise-fall-stagnation-100-years-of-izvestia-a57392), 13 March 2017
- [Barry Popik, "There is no truth in news and no news in truth"](https://barrypopik.com/blog/there_is_no_truth_in_news_and_no_news_in_truth) (etymology of the Pravda/Izvestia joke, with an 1934 citation)
- [Encyclopedia.com, "Soviet Union. Tass"](https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/modern-europe/russian-soviet-and-cis-history/soviet-union-tass)
- [TASS, official history page](https://tass.com/history); [TASS, "FACTBOX: A history of TASS"](https://tass.com/society/1836641)
- [RFE/RL, "ITAR-TASS Looks Ahead By Traveling Back To Soviet-Era Name"](https://www.rferl.org/a/itar-tass-rebranding-soviet-union/26563237.html), 2015
- [Wikipedia, "Novosti Press Agency"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novosti_Press_Agency) (APN founding, 1961)
- Peter Kenez, *The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929* (Cambridge University Press, 1985)
- Matthew Lenoe, *Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers* (Harvard University Press, 2004)
- [Wikipedia, "People's correspondent" (rabkor/selkor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabkor), including the Dymovka case and Lev Sosnovsky's role; [Wikipedia, "Lev Sosnovsky"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Sosnovsky)
- [Wikipedia, "Nikolai Bukharin"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Bukharin) (editorships of *Pravda* and *Izvestia*, arrest and execution dates)
- [Cambridge Core, "Nomenklatura: The Soviet Communist Party's Leadership Recruitment System," *Canadian Journal of Political Science*](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-journal-of-political-science-revue-canadienne-de-science-politique/article/abs/nomenklatura-the-soviet-communist-partys-leadership-recruitment-system/027489B827B7478F03255AF69EA0CAE4)
- [Wikipedia, "Soyuzpechat"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuzpechat)
- [Country Studies (Library of Congress Federal Research Division), "Soviet Union — Newspapers"](http://www.country-data.com/cgi-bin/query/r-12650.html) (1988 press statistics: number of titles, languages, circulation, Union of Journalists membership)
- Leonid Vladimirov, "Glavlit: How the Soviet Censor Works," *Index on Censorship*, vol. 1, no. 3-4 (1972); Law of the USSR "On the Press and Other Mass Media," 12 June 1990 — both as cited in FRAME's [Glavlit and the retouched photographic record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/soviet-glavlit-photo-retouching/)
- Article 125, Constitution of the USSR (1936)
- [Foreign Policy, "Russia's Media Is All Putin's Now After Shutdown of Independent Papers and TV"](https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/05/russia-media-independence-putin/), 5 April 2022; [CBC, "Top Russian independent newspaper suspends operations after warnings from authorities"](https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.6399853), March 2022; [The Conversation, "Russia's disappearing independent media: why they closed"](https://theconversation.com/russias-disappearing-independent-media-why-they-closed-178590)
- [RSF, "Xinhua: the world's biggest propaganda agency"](https://rsf.org/en/xinhua-worlds-biggest-propaganda-agency), 2018; [Wikipedia, "Xinhua News Agency"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhua_News_Agency) (1931 founding as the Red China News Agency; 1935 renaming; 1949 absorption of the Central News Agency's assets)