In 1962 a gathering of Soviet historians at the Academy of Sciences chose the fiftieth anniversary of Pravda's founding to call attention to certain shortcomings in Soviet scholarship concerning V. I. Lenin's leadership of the famous Bolshevik daily. It was noted that although a considerable amount had been written on Lenin's literary contributions to the paper, insufficient attention had been paid to the problem of its political leadership during the crucial two years before the war. This observation heralded the publication of several detailed studies that predictably found that Stalin, Molotov and certain other ‘conciliatory elements’ within Pravda's editorial board had hindered Lenin's efforts to complete the work of the Prague Conference in equating the Bolshevik faction with the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. These studies minimized, however, the degree of his dissatisfaction with the paper and the hostility which his efforts to control Pravda engendered among its editors. Moreover, no Soviet historians and very few of their Western counterparts questioned the basic assumptions that Lenin was instrumental in founding Pravda and that through it he stimulated and directed the growing unrest that characterized Russia's pre-war industrial society. The reticence of Soviet historians to question the ‘Pravda legend’ might be understandable. But it is harder to explain why Western scholars ignored the wealth of material found in Lenin's published correspondence and in the resolutions of his Central Committee that would indicate that the relations between the Bolshevik leader and his famous newspaper were anything but smooth and harmonious.