Pravda Printing House

(full name, V. I. Lenin Printing House of the Newspaper Pravda), the largest newspaper and magazine printing establishment in the USSR, located in Moscow. Construction of the printing house was begun in 1931, and operations began in May 1934. The house uses the letterpress, offset, and gravure printing methods. In 1975 it printed the newspapers Pravda, Komsomol’skaia pravda, Sovetskaia Rossiia, Sotsialisticheskaia industriia, Sel’skaia zhizn’, and Sovetskaia kul’tura and the weekly newspapers Ekonomicheskaia gazeta, Za rubezhom, and Govorit ipokazyvaet Moskva. The daily output of the printing house is 11 million copies of these newspapers, or 67 percent of their total circulation; the remainder are printed in 44 cities throughout the USSR.

The Pravda Printing House also prints the magazines Kommunist, Partiinaia zhizn’ (Party Life), Agitator, Politiches-koe samoobrazovanie (Political Self-education), Ogonek (Beacon), Sovetskii Soiuz (The Soviet Union), Sovetskaia zhenshchina (Soviet Woman), Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker), Krest’ianka (The Peasant Woman), Krokodil, and Zdorov’e (Health). In 1975, 3.5 million copies of magazines were shipped daily. The printing house also produces large numbers of books, booklets, color prints, and postcards.

Production of all newspapers and magazines at the Pravda Printing House is run according to strict time schedules, with intermediate deadlines, and processes using the latest technology are selected to meet these deadlines. The newspaper division has printing and transfer machines for photoreproduction and for stacking and packing the newspapers for shipment. It has facilities for one-bite etching of newspaper plates of various degrees of complexity, and it also has automated typesetting machines, a central foundry with 12 casting machines, and high-output presses.

Among the printing house’s other equipment is automated electronic machines for color correction and color separation. It uses the latest technology for making offset plates, as well as automated production lines for making copper-chrome plates; it also has photocomposition equipment, electronic color scanners, and automatic color separation equipment. Automatic reading, controlling, and cutting machines are used to make gravure plates. There are also etching and electroplating machines with programmed control, as well as machines for printing, folding, and stitching magazines. The offset and gravure printing processes use four-, six-, eight-, and ten-color machines, as well as high-output automatic devices for the production of magazines with inserts and supplements. Documents needed for shipment of the newspapers and magazines within the USSR and abroad are prepared by computer.

In 1975, the Pravda Printing House’s production exceeded its 1940 level by a factor of 27.1, the 1950 level by a factor of 9.6, and the 1960 level by a factor of 3.3. The printing house was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1954 and the Order of the October Revolution in 1971.