the R.S.F.S.R.-the largest Republic and Kommunist, the party's theoretical journal, have the status of departments under the party secretariat. As such they receive guidance directly from the party secretariat and not, as in the case of Izvestia and other Soviet newspapers, from the propaganda and agitation departments. These three publications and the two departments work closely together, however, and their activities are well coordinated.

Pravda, said to have a circulation of over 6 million, is published daily in Moscow and in 15 other Soviet cities from matrices flown in from Moscow. Local newspapers rely heavily on the central press, and sometimes as much as 30 percent of one issue of a provincial paper will consist of reprints from Pravda and Izvestia.

The radio is another important medium of communication for the regime. All radio stations in the Soviet Union are under the general supervision of the all-union radio and television committee which, although an organ of the government, is closely supervised by the party's propaganda and agitation departments. Radio Moscow, the largest station, has an extremely powerful transmitter for beaming broadcasts to domestic and foreign audiences. Its broadcasts are picked up by local stations throughout the U.S.S.R. and relayed to remote areas or rebroadcast locally.

Radio stations play an important role in familiarizing the population with important party and government decrees and in transmitting official explanations and "clarifications" of established policy. In this, the radio relies heavily on the press. Radio stations, for instance, allot considerable time to broadcasting texts of Pravda editorials and the like.

The Soviet wire service, Tass, is another medium of government communication. Like the radio, it is an agency of the Council of Ministers. Tass, with offices throughout the world, gathers foreign news for the use of Soviet domestic radio and newspapers and transmits domestic Soviet news abroad. It is also a major network for the gathering and transmission of news between Moscow and the provinces. Tass bureaus throughout the Soviet Union play an important part in reporting important local developments; Pravda, for instance, prints numerous articles received from local Tass offices.

Pravda is an official channel for i forming lower level officials of policy decisions. Pravda not only transmits the texts of decrees but, in accompanying editorials, interprets them and lays down broad policy guidelines. Second-echelon officials are expected to read Pravda daily and act accordingly.

As soon as a decree is published, the propaganda and agitation departments issue detailed instructions to local party committees setting forth a program for propagandizing the decree, making certain that all personnel affected are fully informed of its contents. These directives are sent directly to local party secretariats and include such orders as the kind and number of meetings to call to discuss the decree, who should attend, who should speak, and what line to stress. A briefing of local professional propagandists and agitators is one of the first meetings held.

Agitators are generally part-time volunteers who are charged with explaining decisions of the regime to small groups in many cases their coworkers in a factory or collective farm. Most of the agitators are attached to the local propaganda and agitation departments or to

quasi-independent propaganda organizations such as the Society for the Dissemination of Scientific and Political Knowledge. The agitators receive general guidance in their work from the agitator's notebooks, published every 10 days by the propaganda and agitation departments.

The agitator system is a much more flexible means of communication than the mass public media. Unlike Pravda, for example, the agitators can tailor their approach to suit a specific audience. Furthermore, direct personal talks can often have a greater impact than the printed word. Some idea of the importance the regime attaches to the agitator network is afforded by the vast number employed. Following the economic reorganization decision in 1957, for example, 15,000 agitators were sent to the Donbass coal mines alone to explain the decision.

Controlled dissemination

There are, of course, numerous top-level decisions and policy directives that are never made public but are kept in closely guarded channels. Such information is sent out to all regional party organizations in the form of secret letters of the party central committee. Some are marked for dissemination only to members of the local party bureau, some to the full party membership. Late in 1958, for example, discovery of "serious deficiencies" in the administration of personnel policy in various parts of the Soviet Union brought on a nationwide campaign for correction of the deficiencies. A series of party meetings was held at the local level at which this problem was discussed on the basis of what was referred to in the press as a "decision of the central committee on errors in personnel policy in Stalino oblast." The text of the decision was never published, however, possibly because public revelation of the contents might have proven embarrassing to the regime.