So I was just reading through a thread about Al-Jazeera America shutting down, and RT was briefly mentioned. Some commentators regarded RT as the "Pravda for millennials", but also that RT is not nearly as "hip" as Pravda was. Is there anyone out there who can tell me what native english speakers thought of Soviet propaganda during the cold war? I know of the "useful idiots" of the pre-ww2 era, but was it in any way fashionable to read Pravda in the post-war west? Was there any consumption of Soviet propaganda at all?
Is it possible that the suggestion that Pravda was "hip" referred not to the old Soviet Communist Party organ printed on odd-smelling paper, but instead to the website pravda.ru?
Anyway with regard to your question of whether it was "fashionalble" to read Pravda in the post-war west...the first thing to consider would be the effect of Khrushchev's 1956 "secret speech," which denounced Stalin's cult of personality. This change of policy shook the faith of those left-wing groups and individuals in the west who had up to that point looked to Moscow for inspiration and leadership.
And so, if you want to talk about "fashionable" propaganda in the west after this point, you're talking about the huge, diverse movement which has been called the "new left" in the English-speaking world. The revolutionary movements in China, Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere provided the iconography of the new radical chic. Who hasn't seen that picture of Che Guevara with his long hair and the star on his beret?
There's a lot of material on the subject. For example, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 by George N. Katsiaficas. And you could look at Tom Wolfe's famous essay that popularized the phrase Radical Chic.
I don't recall Pravda being available (or in non-Russian editions), but there were other semi-official Soviet publications bought mostly by the minority of Communists and well-wishers, as well as Radio Moscow which I'd listen to when the World Service was talking about flower arranging or the Malaysian pop scene (I now deeply regret missing the last, of course, as it's more hip than Pravda ever was).
Sadly I don't think following international news has ever been fashionable, and during the darker phases of the Cold War listening to the "other side" was still less so in the west: at worst suspect, at best eccentric might be a more accurate characterisation of how most viewed such curiosity.