Molodaya Gvardiya (publisher)


Molodaya Gvardiya is an open joint-stock Russian publishing house, one of the oldest publishers in Russia, having been founded in 1922 during the Soviet era. From 1938 until 1992, it was responsible for publishing the magazine Vokrug sveta. It is especially known for its biography series, The Lives of Remarkable People.
During its existence, it has released a total circulation of more than 2 billion copies of books.

History

1922 — The Molodaya Gvardiya publishing and printing association was founded in Moscow on the initiative of the Central Committee of the Komsomol on October 10th. In the first year of the publishing house's operation, 71 books were published with a circulation of 584,000 copies.
1930s — The publishing house began to produce not only books, but also newspaper and magazine products, which made up one fifth of all printed materials of the USSR. Popular Soviet-era youth magazines: Murzilka, Vokrug Sveta, Yuny Tekhnik, Molodaya Gvardiya, Molodoi Kommunist, Komsomolskaya Zhizn, Rovesnik, Studenchesky Meridian, Vozhaty, Yuny Naturalist, Modelist-Konstructor, Yuny Khudozhnik, Pionerskaya Pravda, Vesyolye Kartinki, Shkolny Vestnik - started here. Shkolny Vestnik is the only magazine in Russia for blind and visually impaired children, published in braille, to date.
In 1932, Molodaya Gvardiya published the novel How the Steel Was Tempered by Nikolai Ostrovsky.
1938 — After the disbandment of the Journal and Newspaper Association, the biography series The Lives of Remarkable People, started in 1890 by Russian publisher Florenty Pavlenkov and continued in 1933 by Maxim Gorky, fell under the dominion of Molodaya Gvardiya. The books of the series created by Pavlenkov were unusually capacious in content. In his youth, Aleksey Tolstoy, Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Vernadsky and many other figures of Russian culture were read in the books of the series.
The basic principles of the series: scientific accuracy, high literary level and entertaining. The range of the series is wide: from Confucius and Plato to Freud and Hegel, from Alexander Nevsky to Zhukov, from Wagner to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, from Leonardo da Vinci and Caravaggio to Salvador Dalí and Picasso, from Sergius of Radonezh to Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow.
1942 — Molodaya Gvardiya published Aleksandr Tvardovsky's popular poem, Vasily Tyorkin, and Konstantin Simonov's Lyrics.
at the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house on the day he signed for the printing of his book Psychology and Space. Photo by RIA Novosti, 1968.
1960s — In 1963, the first book of Vasily Shukshin's short stories Villagers was published. The year 1964 was marked by the release of the book of river stories by Vasily Belov, in 1971, a collection of his prose, Rural Stories, was published, making the author famous. Tales from the Don by Nobel laureate Mikhail Sholokhov was one of the first published by Molodaya Gvardiya.
Vasily Chuikov, Marshal of the Soviet Union, was the author of a number of prefaces to the Molodaya Gvardiya books and it was in this house that his book Hardened Youth in Fights, memoirs of the Russian Civil War, was published.
In 1968, Soviet pilot and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin signed for the printing of his book Psychology and Space, written in collaboration with Vladimir Lebedev, which has been reprinted and translated into numerous languages. He also wrote the preface of the biography of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in the ZhZL series, in 1962.
1990s — The circulation of books was sharply reduced, with many series being discontinued. The disappearance of the centralized acquisition of libraries led to the fact that the books of Molodaya Gvardiya became inaccessible to many regions of Russia. In 1991, on the basis of the publishing and printing association Molodaya Gvardiya, the OJSC Molodaya Gvardiya was established, which still exists today.
2000s — A gradual process of reviving the activities of the publishing house was started.
The book series of the Living History: The Daily Life of Humanity publishing house was founded in 1999 on the model of the famous French series La Vie Quotidienne. More than 10 years of its existence, over 110 books have been published in the series, each of which is a historical "portrait" of a certain epoch, a profession or the social layer.
In 2002, the publishing house created a new memoirs book series A Close Past. Among the books published in the series are Life in the East Wind: Between Petersburg and Munich by writer Johannes von Guenther, Without a Choice, autobiography by novelist Leonid Borodin, Music as Fate by composer Georgy Sviridov and correspondence by artist Mikhail Sokolov.
In 2005, the book series The Lives of Remarkable People: The Biography Continues.... In contrast to the classic ZhZL series, in this series there are books about living people.
In 2009, the ZhZL: Small Series was launched, which differs from the classic ZhZL series only in the volume of the material.
The series Case Number... includes books written on the basis of declassified documents, tells about secret military operations, intelligence officers, conspiracies. Among them are the True Story of the Major Whirlwind, Military Counterintelligence of 1918–2010, Secret Operations of the Second World War: A Book of Military Intelligence, Hitler's Sea Wolves, A Gendarme with the Tsar in the Head, Scouts: Heroes Soviet Union and Heroes of Russia, Three Attempts on Lenin, etc.

Book series