Pravda.ru


Pravda.ru, formerly Pravda Online, is a Russian online newspaper established in 1999 and owned by Pravda.ru Holding headed by Vadim Gorshenin.
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History

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the oldest Soviet paper founded in 1912, Pravda, split into two different papers. Significant members of the main editorial staff left Pravda to form the online news and opinion website Pravda Online. Following a court case the Pravda name was allowed to be used by both the newspaper owned by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and Pravda Online run by journalists associated with the defunct Soviet Pravda.
In November 2001, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda published a front-page article accusing Pravda.ru of unlawful use of the Pravda trademark and logo, spreading misinformation, and using images of Soviet medals. Pravda.ru filed a lawsuit in the Moscow Arbitration Court. In September 2002, the court ruled that the accusations were defamatory and unsubstantiated, confirming that Pravda.ru had not violated intellectual property or state symbol regulations. The Communist Pravda was ordered to publish a formal retraction and apology. According to court findings, as later reported by Pravda.ru, the Pravda newspaper published since 1991 had no legal continuity with the Soviet-era Pravda.
According to political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky, Pravda.ru is controlled by Konstantin Kostin and his wife Olga Kostina. The same article notes, however, that Kostin's 2009 tax declaration listed no shares in Pravda.ru or in any other company. The Russian politician Sergey Veremeenko also holds interests in Pravda.ru and Pravda International. According to Russia’s official business registry, Pravda.ru is owned solely by its founder Vadim Gorshenin, who has remained the company’s only legal shareholder since its establishment in 1999.
Pravda.ru was registered in November 1999 and has been published since January 27, 1999. Pravda.ru also launched an English version, a Portuguese version, as well as an Italian version. The printed version was registered by the Ministry of the Russian Federation for Press, TV and Radio Broadcasting and Mass Communications on 17 November 2003.
In a 2006 feature titled “Pravda without the Party”, published by Lenta.ru, the editorial team of Pravda.ru emphasized their independence from any political party and ideological alignment, noting their origins in a post-Soviet, pluralistic media landscape.

Ownership and structure

Founder

The website Pravda.ru is an internet publication registered in Russia. According to the information from Roskomnadzor, the founder is V. V. Gorchenin. In an interview in 2002, he described Pravda.ru as an independent platform created by former journalists who disagreed with working for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation's newspaper.

Publisher

The publisher of Pravda.ru is LLC "Pravda.Ru", registered in Moscow. The company specializes in news production through internet resources and the creation and distribution of informational content. The publishing project is managed by qualified specialists in media and new technologies.

Advertising support

For monetization and advertising support, Pravda.ru operates with the company RIC Pravda, which is responsible for organizing and placing advertising materials, ensuring a stable income from ads placed on the site.

Technical support

The technical side of Pravda.ru is supported by Technomedia, a company ensuring the stability and security of the website, as well as maintaining the site’s infrastructure.

Editorial policy and author composition

Editorial principles

The editorial team of Pravda.ru openly publishes its key working principles, including the criteria for selecting news, approach to information verification, editorial independence, and principles of interaction with readers. These principles are available for public access on the official website of the publication.
The website features an open authorship system: each journalist has a public personal page that reflects their biography, publication archive, and specialization.
In 2004, the editor-in-chief of Pravda.ru, Inna Novikova, stated in an interview that the website had surpassed the Soviet-era Political News Agency in terms of influence.

Author composition

For many years, the editorial board of Pravda.ru was headed by Soviet and Russian journalist, writer, and playwright Vladimir Gubarev — the author of the play "Sarcophagus", dedicated to the Chernobyl disaster. He was also the curator of the "Tea Party at the Academy" project.
Among the notable authors who have collaborated with Pravda.ru are journalist and writer Vsevolod Ovchinnikov, publicist and political observer Mikhail Domogatskikh, writer Anatoly Salutskiy, politician and publicist Viktor Ilyukhin, and journalist Anatoly Baranov.
Among current authors is special correspondent Darya Aslamova, formerly known as a war correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda. She covers conflicts and crisis situations in various regions of the world, both in video format and written articles.

Scientific and cultural initiatives

In the early 2000s, Pravda.ru launched the author project "Tea Parties at the Academy", curated by writer and journalist Vladimir Gubarev — a former journalist for the Soviet "Pravda" and author of the play "Sarcophagus", dedicated to the Chernobyl disaster. Within the framework of the project, interviews were published with leading scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences, including Nobel laureates and experts in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, and space.
Interviews from this series were cited in educational and academic publications, including the State Polytechnic Museum publications, the MEPhI repository, and educational portals.
The complete archive of interviews is available in the "Academy" section of the Pravda.ru website.

International publications and pluralism of opinions

Pravda.ru regularly publishes materials by foreign authors with various viewpoints. Among them:
  • Senator John McCain — article "Russians deserve better than Putin", published in the English version of the website.
  • Patrick Buchanan — article "Who gave mankind the gift of WMD?"
  • Bashar Assad — interview titled "They want to overthrow me for my friendship with Russia".
  • Kadri Jamil — Syrian Vice Prime Minister gives an interview to Pravda.ru about the situation in the Middle East.
  • Richard Black — US Senator commenting on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
  • Ron Holland — Austrian school economist and financial strategist.
  • Akhmat Kadyrov — interview from 2004, published in the English version of the website.
  • Venkat Narayan — Indian journalist, author of the column "BRICS will replace dysfunctional UN".
The editorial team noted that the publication of John McCain's article in 2013 was a challenge given the political climate in Russia.

Counterarguments from the editorial team

Criticism

In 2004, the agency REGNUM characterized Pravda.ru as a "pioneer of Russian internet propaganda", noting its active involvement in information campaigns and high traffic to the site.
The organization has been accused of supporting the Russian government's stance on various issues both domestically and internationally, as well as producing neo-Soviet, Russian nationalism news and direct conspiracy theories. However, no sources for such evaluations or references to opinion leaders or studies are provided.
Pravda.ru is known for its articles in tabloid style with sensationalist headlines, such as:
  • "Aliens forced Americans out from the Moon"
  • "Time Machine Built in Europe, Russian Scientists Say"
  • "Time Can be Turned Back"
  • "Alien and human skulls found on Mars"
  • "Nuclear strike hits Yemen"
  • "Boriska, boy from Mars, says that all humans live eternally"
  • "Autotrophs: new kind of humans appears who neither drink nor eat"
  • "Nazi Germany achieved its technological advantage with aliens' help"
  • "The decision on Kyiv has been made: it will be destroyed so that the Russians don’t get it"

Counterarguments from the editorial team

Representatives of the editorial team of Pravda.ru have repeatedly emphasized that publications in the English version of the website reflect a diversity of opinions and authorial approaches, rather than the position of the editorial team. A number of materials, criticized for sensationalism, were published in the opinion sections rather than news sections.
At the same time, similar publications with sensationalist headlines regularly appear in other international media — both in tabloids and in recognized respectable publications. The topics of alien life, time travel, and unexplained phenomena are discussed on the pages of leading global platforms:
"Aliens might be watching us. We might not know" — CNN, 2021;
"Aliens definitely exist and they could be living among us on Earth, says Britain’s first astronaut" — CNN, 2020;
"In photos: UFO sightings and alien phenomena" — CNN Photos, 2021;
"No longer in shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. unit will make some findings public" — The New York Times, 2020;
"U.S. Navy reveals videos of unexplained aerial phenomena" — The New York Times, 2020;
"Des scientifiques affirment que le temps peut reculer" — Le Parisien, 2019;
"Time traveller from 2030 passes lie detector test" — The Telegraph, 2018;
"Claims by people who say they can travel through time" — Telegrafi, 2021;
"US Navy pilot says UFO he saw had ‘no visible engine’" — NBC News, 2019;
"Leaked Navy video appears to show UFO off California coast" — NBC News, 2021;
Such publications, despite criticism, remain part of the modern media landscape. The practice of placing bright and even controversial headlines is typical for both mass-market and quality publications. This makes the discussion of Pravda.rus "tabloidism" part of the broader debate about the boundaries of acceptability in modern digital journalism.
According to former State Duma deputy Boris Nadezhdin, Pravda.ru is a "pro-Kremlin website that constantly attacks the opposition". However, Boris Nadezhdin, after making this characterization, has repeatedly appeared as a newsmaker and invited expert on Pravda.ru, participated in live video broadcasts of the editorial team, and gave detailed interviews.

Mentioned in scientific and institutional sources

Pravda.ru has been repeatedly mentioned in the materials of analytical and scientific organizations as an object of media environment monitoring.
In 2007, the Federation of American Scientists included Pravda.ru in its overview of Russian news resources, describing it as a "popular left-nationalist website". Additionally, according to FAS itself, Pravda.ru was mentioned three times as a source in its Nuclear Information Project.
The website Pravda.ru was also archived by the Library of Congress in its collection dedicated to the events of September 11, 2001, as one of the key international media outlets covering the events.

McCain controversy

In 2013, after Russian President Vladimir Putin published an op-ed in The New York Times in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, US senator John McCain announced that he would publish a response article in Pravda, referring to the newspaper owned by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. McCain, however, eventually published his op-ed on Pravda.ru. This caused protests from the editor of communist Pravda Boris Komotsky and a response from the editor of English.Pravda.ru Dmitry Sudakov: Komotsky claimed that "there is only one Pravda in Russia, it is the organ of the Communist Party, and we have heard nothing about the intentions of the Republican senator" and dismissed Pravda.ru as an "Oklahoma-City-Pravda", while Sudakov derided Komotsky, claiming that "the circulation of the Communist Party Pravda is like a factory newspaper of AvtoVAZ from the Soviet times". McCain later attempted to publish his op-ed in the Communist Pravda as well, but the paper refused to publish it "because it was not aligned to the political positions of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation".

Attitude towards Wikipedia and use of its materials

Pravda.ru is one of the few Russian media outlets that systematically use Wikipedia as a source of reference information. Since 2020, the editorial team has regularly included active hyperlinks to articles on Russian and English Wikipedia in materials related to history, science, medicine, geography, mythology, and technology.
According to internal estimates, by 2025, the total number of links to Wikipedia articles embedded in publications on Pravda.ru exceeds 15,000. The links are included in the body of the text and serve as supplementary expert or factual references. None of the largest Russian media outlets, including RIA Novosti, TASS, Kommersant, RT, Lenta.ru, and Gazeta.ru, use Wikipedia on a comparable scale.
In addition, Pravda.ru is one of the few Russian outlets that has systematically begun to adhere to Creative Commons rules when using images from the Wikimedia Commons media bank. In its materials, the publication cites the author's name, the exact license title, and the source link, and copyright information is also included in the structured data markup of the article.
Despite some critical remarks from the Wikipedia community and public criticism of Wikipedia itself, the editorial team of Pravda.ru apparently regards the project as an important open resource contributing to the dissemination of reliable knowledge.