Soviet Weekly

The Soviet Weekly was a propagandistic newspaper, published from 1942 until 1991, that gave news of the Soviet Union in English. Its stated aim was "to assist in the development of British-Soviet friendship by providing an objective picture of Soviet life and opinion."^[1]

Published by Sovinformburo,^[2] the Press Department of the Soviet Union, at the Soviet Embassy in Britain,^[3][4] its first edition (as the Soviet War News Weekly)^[2] appeared in 1942 (the year after the German invasion led to the USSR becoming an ally of the UK). The final issue was that of 5 December 1991,^[5] three weeks before the Soviet Union was dissolved.

Issued on Thursdays and offering "an upto-the-minute and authentic picture of the USSR",^[1] it had a modest cover price (6d, or two and a half pence, in 1967),^[6] but most issues were distributed free.^[3] In 1946, the weekly print-run was 75,000.^[7]

One of its early editors was the screenwriter, novelist and (later) pagan, Stewart Farrar (1916-2000). Mary Rosser-Hicks (1937-2010), the future chief executive of the Communist daily the Morning Star, worked for the paper until 1975,^[8] as did South African anti-apartheid activist Shanthie Naidoo during the early 1970s.^[9]

Soviet and Russian photographer Yuriy Abramochkin worked in Soviet Weekly for almost 40 years.^[10]

In popular culture

The comedian and writer Alexei Sayle has described how this was the newspaper his Communist parents read during his upbringing in Liverpool in the 1950s and 1960s.^[11]

References