IT looks almost the same but it's not the real thing. Russians of the old school picked up their post to find that instead of the once mighty Pravda they received an impostor called Pravda 5.
Pravda, which means "truth", once had a circulation of nine million copies throughout the Soviet Union. Now its sales, mainly by subscription, have fallen to below 300,000 and its Greek millionaire owners have had enough.
Christos and Theodoros Giannikos had pumped millions into Pravda as a business venture. Their politics did not coincide with that of the paper but they identified a niche in the market. There were still a lot of communists in Russia, they reckoned, and the market for Pravda was good.
In one sense they were right. In the presidential elections earlier this month 30 million people voted for the communist candidate, Mr Gennady Zyuganov.
But as their millions dwindled, the Greeks realised they had failed to bargain for a staff which kept producing old style propaganda and left it to other newspapers to provide an effective opposition to the government.
Pravda's journalists were never known for their fierce dedication to beating deadlines and frequently work for Wednesday's edition was completed early on Monday at which stage work began for Thursday's paper.
This correspondent once interviewed Mr Viktor Ilyukhin, now a leading communist parliamentarian but then a Pravda journalist. He was exhausted, he told me, because he had had to edit "an entire article" earlier in the day.
The crunch for Pravda came at the start of this week when the Giannikos brothers were prevented by police from entering the building, on Truth Street in central Moscow, where their newspaper is housed.
They decided to withdraw their funding and, with a new staff, launch Pravda 5, which hit the streets yesterday. It took some readers by surprise while others did not notice the difference.
Pretty soon, though, even the most complacent Pravda reader will recognise the paper has changed. A diet of crime, sex and a smattering of left wing politics is promised. Whether it will work remains to be seen but it certainly has for Korisornolskaya Pravda, once its junior partner.
The former organ of the Young Communists now sells almost two million copies daily.
