Half of Soviet families were then regularly reading the weekly. That was no exception. 1990 was the peak point of the mass media's popularity among the population and no one anticipated the scale of the fall that followed. Dimensions of the disaster for national press can be seen in the figures of the accompanying table. With some explanation, the table can also give an insight into the uneven trends of the circulation figures.
Subscriptions generally account for up to ninety percent of circulation.
Since inflation growth has become unpredictable, subscriptions are charged twice a year in Russia, four times a year in Ukraine, and so on, depending on the scale of the economic downfall in the ex-Soviet republic. Increased costs have been the major economic reason for the recent fall of circulation. Cost of delivery, conducted in the USSR by the post office, accounted for about 30 percent of the cover price of a publication in late 1980s, but has grown to 50 percent last year, about 60 percent this year, and is expected to comprise as much as 85 percent of the cover price in 1994. Printing costs, although different for different newspapers, have grown thousands of times in the same time slot. The press survives these hardships only because of state subsidies.