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"Pravda" editors pledge to do better, 23 August 1991

Editors’ statement on the front page of iconic Soviet/ Russian daily "Pravda" from 23 August 1991, just after the failed 1991 anti-Gorbachev putsch.

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"Komsomolskaya pravda" sets a Guinness World Record

In May 1990, the long-running Soviet newspaper “Komsomolskaya pravda” set a world record with nearly 22 million daily copies. This staggering total marked the peak of Soviet print media's reach before the 1990 Press Law shifted financial responsibility to outlets themselves, making such high print runs unsustainable.

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Citizen K.'s "Kitchen Diary" in "Komsomolskaya Pravda"

This editorial call, published on 29 September 1990 in the daily “Komsomolskaya pravda” (1925-), asked readers to keep and submit "kitchen diaries" on shortages and price changes in their area as a way to track the progress (and deficiencies) of perestroika-era economic reforms.

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Novikov and Afrika Come Out

During an interview, the artists Timur Novikov and Sergey “Afrika” Bugaev talk about their otherwise unconfessed homosexuality in an intentionally shocking way.

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Tanks in Lithuania

Coverage of Soviet tanks rolling into the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius in January 1991 from Pravda, the Russian Communist Party’s press organ since 1911.

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Human Chain Across the Baltic Republics

Pravda’s (1911-) coverage of the Human Chain on 24 August 1989, documenting the previous day’s political action by hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians, who linked together in a 600-kilometer-long “living chain” (zhivaia tsep’) that stretched from Tallinn, Estonia to Vilnius, Lithuania. 

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