Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

McCain Misfires at Putin in Wrong Pravda

Senator John McCain's appeal to Russians makes the wrong point in the wrong publication.

September 19, 2013 at 5:22 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

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The Soviet-era Pravda, the publication in which Senator John McCain apparently wanted to print his opinion piece criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin, has a long and noteworthy history -- one not particularly congruent with the message of freedom McCain intended to send.

In 1936, the year McCain was born, the almighty organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party published an article entitled "A Mess instead of Music," which nearly sent the composer Dmitri Shostakovich to the prison camps. Shostakovich had to write the traditional-sounding Fifth Symphony to win Josef Stalin's forgiveness, which was also expressed on the pages of Pravda.