Pravda: inside the Soviet news machine.

• Author: Frankel, Jonathan

Pravda: Inside the Soviet News Machine.

Angus Roxburgh. George Braziller, $19.95. In this scholarly study, Roxburgh puts aside Western rhetoric and portrays Pravda not as a masterful manipulator of information and disinformation, but as sometimes pathetic, and often comic.

The paper's problems start with its prose. The internal affairs and "Party Life' departments are so overwhelmingly dull only the active party members and, ironically, American Kremlinologists read them. Sure, plenty of American papers are dull and boring, but Pravda takes it one step further by combining its somnolent story topics with obsolete words and convoluted Russian grammar. A full 85 percent of its readership, according to a "secret survey,' doesn't understand Pravda at all.

What sections of Pravda do Russians like? Foreign news, even though it extensively borrows and twists clippings from Western newspapers, is the unqualified favorite. By filling the section with these clippings, Pravda tries to give its propaganda a "stamp of approval' from the western media. In 1983, for example, when the shooting down of KAL 007 elicited a virtually unified condemnation from the west, the Soviets managed to...