Pravda reports...

There's an old Russian saying that dates from the years of the Cold War:

В "Правде" нет известий, а в "Известиях" нет правды.

Literally, it means "There's no news in Pravda, and there's no truth in Izvestia" - Pravda and Izvestia being the names of the two main daily Soviet newspapers. The Russian word pravda means "truth", while izvestiya means "news". There was of course a major issue with both concepts in Soviet society - the news could almost always be relied on not to be the truth.

Nowadays, Russian society has moved on. Both newspapers are now in the hands of private owners - and indeed, Pravda exists in two versions: a hard copy daily, owned by a Greek concern, and an online version, Pravda.Ru, owned and managed by a syndicate of Russian journalists, which appears not only in Russian, but also in English and Portuguese. The truth is being blazoned forth as never before.

Pravda.ru runs a highly active and well-attended international online discussion forum. It's all in English, and it attracts posters from around the world - quite a few among them are from Russia, but there are also posters from Britain, the US, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, Germany, India and the Middle East.

What's disturbing about this large and popular forum is that it gives a voice to some of the most intolerant and bigoted rants to be found on the Internet.

If this is the "truth" that the new Russia is trying to propagate in the world, then I think we should all view it with great alarm.

To get a flavour of what I'm talking about, visit the main page

here

And some individual entries that really cause one to wonder about the forum's purpose are

here

here

here

here

and

here


Hat tip: ALLEGRO