MOSCOW — When its devoted readers reached into their mailboxes Tuesday morning for Russia's oldest and most famous communist newspaper, they came up with a big surprise: nothing.
Pravda, the ponderous organ of communist thought founded by Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades in 1912, one of the enduring icons of the Soviet era and probably history's most inaccurately named publication (Pravda means truth in Russian), has ceased publication.
A victim of many modern ills in the newly competitive marketplace, none has hurt the paper as profoundly as its inflexible desire to cater to a vanishing communist readership.
It now has fewer than 200,000 subscribers, down from 11 million, and the paper's owners, two Greek millionaires who believe in free enterprise and say they lost millions on the paper, have fought frequently with the communist staff.
