In the modern world, the press has had a decisively important role in spreading political ideologies. This was true even in tsarist Russia, a country that had a large percentage of illiterates. Before the Revolution, partisans of the government, liberals, and revolutionaries competed with one another in their newspapers. Under the circumstances, the Bolsheviks also had to be journalists. They spent much of their time writing articles for legal and underground papers, attempting to appeal to workers, peasants, and intellectuals, and at the same time trying to evade the censor and the police. In the process, they developed propaganda skills. Undoubtedly, their journalistic work was one of their formative experiences: They learned the use of Aesopian language and learned that censorship was a part of the political struggle.

The prerevolutionary press

During the last decades of the Empire, Russian journalism developed remarkably quickly. In 1890, 796 periodical publications appeared; in the next ten years, this number grew to 1,002 and by 1910 to 2,391. Newspapers multiplied particularly fast. Their number grew between 1883 and 1913 from 80 to 1,158. Although in the 1880s only the largest papers appeared in printings of 20,000, by the turn of the century there were several papers with a circulation of over 100,000. Institutions of modern journalism, such as telegraph agencies, clubs, and unions of journalists, were formed in Russia for the first time. The rapid growth of journalism, together with the expansion of the educational system and of the publishing industry, was part of the larger process of transformation that was taking place in Russia.