The once-mighty Pravda newspaper has gone back to its origins as a struggling opposition newspaper 100 years after its first edition appeared.
The paper that for decades was the mouthpiece of the ruling Soviet Communist Party, churning out propaganda that made a mockery of its title meaning "Truth", is still defiantly urging the workers of the world to unite despite suffered a humiliating fall from grace as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Banned by former Russian president Boris Yeltsin in 1991, Pravda was later revived, then sold to a Greek family, engulfed by financial problems and finally taken over in 1997 by the Russian Communist Party Central Committee.
Times are tough for the publication now, but its editor says that battling hostile authorities, the threat of closure and financial problems is how Pravda spent its early years after first appearing in St Petersburg on May 5th, 1912, until the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
"In many respects our role and purpose has gone back to what it was before 1917," Boris Komotsky said in his office in Moscow's Pravda Street, a huge photograph of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin reading Pravda on the wall behind him. "We are the opposition's main organ, fighting for power, for policy changes.
"We've gone though so many problems. Now each of the workers here is a hero. At times they've had to work without getting a paycheck," he said.
The paper will celebrate its anniversary with a reception in central Moscow but otherwise says it allows itself no luxuries.
In many ways, Pravda seems stuck in the past. A large bust of Lenin greets anyone entering the newspaper's offices. Busts of Karl Marx and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin rest on a cabinet behind the editor's desk. Marxist literature lines the walls.
The newspaper does not look very different from in Soviet times, with three Soviet medals it received still featuring prominently on the masthead under the slogan: "Proletariat of all countries, unite!"
The paper is smaller - now just four pages - and Mr Komotsky said there are just 23 journalists, including three in the former Soviet republics of Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus. The print run is 100,000 compared to millions in its heyday, yet the layout and content are familiar to anyone who read the paper in Soviet days, with articles extolling the virtues of the worker and railing against capitalism.
"We are the only newspaper in Russia today that has not changed its form and content," said Mr Komotsky, a senior member of the Communist Party. "We are true to our name."
A woman holds an issue of the Pravda newspaper as she visits the newspaper's receiving office in Moscow. Photograph: Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters
Critics say that was never really the case at Pravda. News was never a priority and jokes about its lack of objectivity and dullness abounded. In a play on the meaning of its title and that of the daily Izvestia, which means "news", Soviet citizens used to quip: "There's no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia."
Even at its peak, Pravda was more widely read than it was loved. Russians say that even the Communist Party members who subscribed to it did so mainly out of a sense of obligation.
However, it was required reading for Moscow-based foreign correspondents and diplomats who pored over it for news about what was really going on behind the scenes. Articles rarely led on the real news, especially if it reflected badly on the Soviet Union, but journalists learnt to skim through long and turgid articles to find the paragraph starting "Odnako" [however] which could suddenly reveal a newsworthy gem.
The order in which Communist Party officials were listed at official events showed who was in favour. Even veiled criticism in Pravda meant an official was out of favour. News would sometimes appear from the provinces, otherwise unobtainable for foreigners at a time when travel was limited outside the capital.
Readers' letters sometimes gave a sense of what Soviet people were really thinking, and, in a secretive country where news was hard to come by for Soviet citizens and often censored, Pravda would occasionally announce major developments such as the death of leaders.
Reuters