His sales manager is thrilled to have got a full 30 pages of ads – from Western firms – at $3,000 a page for the inaugural edition of PC World USSR, so there’s Pat, happily leafing through a copy at the launch party in Moscow when his features freeze as he realises that there are just four pages of ads in the finished product: well, said one of the Borises in the editorial department airily, we rejected 50 of the ads because they didn’t contain enough technical facts for our readers, and then we chucked out another 11 because they simply repeated stuff that was in the editorial: the McGovern organisation, no slouch at the best of times, swung into action and turned the launch party into a wake by forcefully explaining the hard facts of commercial life, and – a real stroke of luck, the 50,000 print run sold out overnight, so a second edition was printed, this time with the ads.
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