The News that Peter Saw Fit to Print

Like it or not, we live in an information age, one in which we are inundated with news – some designed to inform, some to deceive, promote, or entertain. We are often left struggling to keep our heads above water in this never-ending torrent. But everyone knows that it was not always this way. Some of us can even remember life without mobile phones, constantly updated internet news, and social networks.

In bygone days, news traveled slowly, transmitted by word of mouth, gaining, losing, and changing details along the way. Royal decrees were spread by the tsar's messengers faster than ordinary news, but even here there was no getting around Russia's vast expanses. Back in the seventeenth century, for example, when the people of Irkutsk wrote to complain to the tsar about the corrupt and ruthless voyevoda who had been appointed to govern them and who was making their lives miserable, their petition took three years to reach Moscow. Additional time was needed to consider the matter, and then the response took more years to reach Irkutsk. In short, it was an eternity before the petitioners heard that the tsar chose to leave the voyevoda where he was.

Even though the country's rulers had a relative advantage when it came to disseminating news, it was they who were most frustrated by how long it took to get information to the populace. After all, in order to firmly integrate its territories and instill a sense of patriotism, a government needs to be able to publicize successes and circulate the official version of events. With the march of time, Russia's rulers increasingly wanted to influence the hearts and minds of their subjects. They gradually realized that newspapers could be a key tool in this effort.

Compared to other countries, Russia was in no hurry to establish newspapers. (Not surprisingly, one of the first politicians to promote the publishing of newspapers was Cardinal Richelieu, who clearly understood the value of shaping the opinions of France's educated classes.) Before the age of Peter the Great, both the powers that be and the populace were perfectly happy to have important news announced in churches or to have it spread via stories and rumors related by pilgrims, merchants, or vagrants.

Peter's father, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, had an inquisitive mind, and was interested in various Western innovations, so it is little wonder that he was the first to take a step in the direction of establishing a print news medium: he had his court secretaries put together special lists called Kuranty (from the French courant, "current"), which included the most important or simply entertaining reports from abroad. This was no newspaper, of course. Kuranty were handwritten and read out loud to the tsar and his inner circle.

Peter the Great was not content to settle for such a limited use of what, back then, could hardly be called "mass media." In December 1702 he ordered all government offices to forward their most important items of news to the Monastirsky Prikaz for circulation. (The Monastery Department might seem an odd choice for an editorial office, until you consider that it was created by Peter as part of his effort to undercut church authority; it was thus staffed with fellow Europeanizing progressives.) Peter expected his orders to be carried out expeditiously, and by late December news or vedomosti (sheets, lists, registers), as they were then called, began to be compiled and rewritten. Peter assigned urgency to this task.

On January 2, 1703, the first issue of a publication simply titled Vedomosti was printed. This was hardly a newspaper by today's standards. The pages were tiny, with narrow margins and no illustrations, at first. Soon it started to feature woodcuts depicting Moscow and St. Petersburg. Formatting was extremely simple. A few issues featured small graphics (the Peter and Paul Fortress, ships on the Neva, etc.) marking the start of each paragraph. Furthermore, issues did not appear on a set schedule. In 1703 and 1704, when Peter was keeping an attentive eye on the publication, there were 39 issues per year, while in later years there were often just a few issues.

Contemporary Russians would find the first issues of Vedomosti difficult to read. Before 1710, it was published in the early Cyrillic we now encounter mostly on icons. However for Peter, the most important readership was Russians who shared his interest in Western innovation, so in the newspaper's seventh year, the tsar ordered that Vedomosti be printed in a simplified "civil" font, which he helped design. It soon became clear that suddenly modernizing the newspaper's typeface was problematic. Peter's haste to reform and Europeanize his country came into conflict in this instance with his desire that as many people as possible read Vedomosti. Not everyone had studied in the imperial schools that Peter had founded, where they would have been familiarized with the civil font. Therefore, for a while, the newspaper was produced in two versions – one using the new civil font and the other using the traditional font.

And what could be done about people reluctant to spend an entire half kopek to purchase a newspaper? To make Vedomosti widely available, it was ordered that the patrons of taverns should be given free copies, and those who undertook to read the newspaper were to be treated to a complimentary cup of tea.

This generous approach was taken because of the importance assigned to publicizing reports of Russian victories in the war with Sweden and generally letting the people know of Russia's growing military might. All Russians needed to be informed that "a great number of captured Swedish artillery taken in Marienburg and Schlüsselburg" had been brought to Russia by the tsar, or the fact that "In Moscow, 400 bronze cannons, howitzers, and mortars have been cast… And at the cannon foundry, 40,000 poods* of bronze are now ready for new castings."

After Peter's death, publication of Vedomosti, like many of his pet projects, came to an end, at least for a while. But in 1728 the newspaper was reborn, now as St. Petersburg Vedomosti, a name that persisted until the First World War. Of course, in the nineteenth century, journals featuring news, commentary, and literature were the primary print medium, rather than newspapers, but gradually the tide turned.

Today we no longer have taverns with free newspapers, or complimentary tea for anyone willing to read about Russia's successes. Apparently, nowadays most of us feel we have other incentives to read the papers.