Until the very final years of the USSR, the censorship regime there was such that no non-communist English-language publications could be sold openly. Small quantities of 'bourgeois' publications were imported for academic etc. use, but access to them was restricted. Given that English was one of the main foreign languages that Soviet students studied, there was a certain demand for the Morning Star among the Soviet population as it was virtually the only English-language newspaper freely available. Its sale was subsidised in the USSR - when I was a student there in 1983, I recall that it cost 15 kopecks, which was less (at the official exchange rate) than its price in Britain, but more than the normal price for a Soviet newspaper (3 - 5 kopecks). It was no secret that by the mid-1980s, the orders from the USSR, GDR etc. accounted for almost half the print run. That was an indirect subsidy to the paper by the Soviet bloc countries. I have no reliable information about any direct subsidies.