Novosti Press Agency

(APN), a Soviet public information service founded in Moscow in 1961. Its founding members were the USSR Journalists’ Union, the USSR Writers’ Union, the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations With Foreign Countries, and the Znanie (Knowledge) society. Its aim is to aid the development and strengthening of mutual understanding, confidence, and friendship among peoples. APN prepares the following materials for the press, news agencies, publishing houses, and radio and television stations of the USSR and foreign countries: articles, commentaries, interviews, discussions, surveys, feature stories, reports, and communications on the domestic and foreign policy of the USSR and the social, economic, and cultural life of the Soviet people and materials that reflect the point of view of the Soviet public on the major domestic and international events. It supplies the Soviet press, radio, and television with information on the politics, social life, economy, and culture of foreign countries.

APN publishes the bulletins Po Sovetskomu Soiuzu, Mezhdunarodnaia informatsiia, Nauka i tekhnika, Kul’tura i iskusstvo, Sport (all since 1962), Molodezh—zhizn’ i problemy as well as the English-language Daily Review, a survey of the Soviet press (since 1963). In 1969 APN published 50 illustrated magazines, seven newspapers, and more than 100 information bulletins outside the Soviet Union. The APN photography service prepares more than 120,000 photo reports a year for the press (more than 2 million prints). The editors of the APN television service collaborate with foreign television companies to make television films about the USSR.

APN has its own publishing house, which between 1965 and 1967 alone produced, in the USSR and other countries, more than 35 million books, brochures, booklets, albums, and guides in Russian and foreign languages. It has also fulfilled 250 orders of foreign publishing houses on preparing manuscripts for books about the USSR; more than 10 million copies of these books have been printed during these three years. APN publishes (1968) in 56 languages of the world, and its literary and illustrated publications are circulated in 110 countries. The agency has contacts with 70 states through modern communications. It has bureaus and news offices in 73 countries and volunteer departments and news offices in all the Union republics and large economic regions of the USSR. Writers, journalists and public figures from other countries contribute to APN along with Soviet authors.