Ekonomicheskaia gazeta (The Economic Gazette) was a 24-page weekly journal affairs published by the CC CPSU and devoted to the party's economic policy. Although its coverage was limited and its journalists conservative, some of its writers (such as V. Varavka) did manage to produce consistently insightful reporting. Other journals exhaustively read for this study included the party's theoretical bimonthlies, Kommunist and Voprosy istorii KPSS (Questions of CPSU History), and the rather dull journal for party officials, Partiinaia zhizn (Party Life). These sources contained a few interesting items, but by and large they were highly politicized, and several notches further removed from reality than Ekonomicheskaia gazeta.

Academic and technical journals, such as Voprosy ekonomiki (Economic Issues) or Planovoe khoziatsvo (The Planned Economy), and even the iconoclastic Novosibirsk-based EKO (short for Economics and Organization of Industry) seemed to be forbidden from making any reference to the party's role in the economy. Thus Ekonomicheskaia gazeta was the principal source of information on the CPSU's routine economic policy during the Brezhnev years. In January 1990 the journal was renamed Ekonomika i zhizn (Economics and Life), and it has subsequently lost its hegemony to independent newspapers such as Kommersant.

Most Ekonomicheskaia gazeta articles dealt with aspects of economic management in a fairly technical fashion, and tended to avoid discussion of party interventions in decision-making, beyond ritual invocations of the party's wisdom in opening and closing paragraphs.