Word: pravda
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...size of the Soviet Union (more than two times larger than the U.S.), letters frequently get lost in the mail. Sometimes even important documents disappear into the maw of a vast bureaucracy. But a whole train? Just so. In June 1983, according to an article last week in Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, a 28-car freight train loaded with crushed rock rolled out of the Tomashgorodsky Metal Factory in the Ukraine, bound for a construction site 350 miles away in the Russian republic. The train left, Pravda reported, "but it did not arrive...
...with Moscow. Finally, Polyak queried the central search section of the Rail Ministry itself. He was informed that "it was not possible to do anything" because the shipment documents had routinely been destroyed after a year. No matter that the train had left less than a year before. Said Pravda: "Even Sherlock Holmes from Baker Street in London could have lost his way in the paper labyrinth...
...Year to Tom Stoppard's rueful tragicomedy Night and Day. But the current wave of antipress feeling in the U.S. may have spread to Britain as well. Audiences at London's National Theater, which in 1972 staged an acclaimed revival of The Front Page, are cheering now for Pravda, a coruscating, comic attack on Fleet Street that portrays reporters as timid, trivial and truckling and that describes a newspaper as "the foundry of lies." (The ironic title is Russian for "truth" and also the name of the Soviet Communist Party newspaper...
Unlike American attacks on the press, which tend to come from the right and assail reporters as too skeptical toward government, Pravda lambastes London's journalists from the left, as tame toadies of deceitful politicians. The handful of reporters in the play who show glimmers of decency are hounded out of the trade or nullified by their editors or derailed by their own greed ^ and ambition. In the climax of the plot, the forces of virtue, somewhat tarnished themselves, are gulled into printing a libel that undoes their chances of stopping an evil publisher. Like too many journalists, these dubious...
...that moment, it becomes clear that Pravda is not merely lamenting the newspapers that are but pining for newspapers that might be. The play is not foremost a preachment, however, but a superb high-energy entertainment, with a cast of 33, lavishly detailed sets, throbbing music and an urgent, propulsive style set by Co-Author Hare, who directed. It recalls the morally assertive best of warmhearted Broadway satires like The Solid Gold Cadillac in every regard save one: Pravda does not and, given its bitter convictions, could not have a happy ending...