“MK” again celebrates its centenary

100 years ago the youth newspaper changed its name

January 24th is another round date for MK. A little more than four years have passed since the centenary anniversary of the capital’s youth passed away, and now the time has come again for the beautiful number 100 on our editorial “chronometer”. A century has passed since an important event in the biography of the popular newspaper: it changed its name and turned from “Young Truth” into “Young Leninist”.

This is such a cunning “Emkovsky” interweaving of numbers. A seemingly impossible formula: 100+4=100. But if there is the geometry of Lobachevsky, surprising for some, then why not the arithmetic of “Moskovsky Komsomolets”?!

The reason for such a paradoxical mathematical phenomenon was a series of renamings that occurred in the first ten years of the existence of the printed organ of the capital’s youth. Let us recall these stages of the long journey: the newspaper began publishing in December 1919 under the name “Young Communard”, a few months later it changed its name to “Youthful Truth”, and three and a half years later, in January 1924, another , as it is now called in a fashionable foreign term, rebranding.

The last newspaper issue with a “youthful” title reached readers on January 22, 1924. On this day, the whole country was already covered with a wave of mourning events on the occasion of the death of V.I. Lenin, however, of course, on the youth pages created a few days earlier (it was published twice a week then) there is not a hint of such an epoch-making tragic event . But a day later the next issue of the newspaper was printed under a different name. On the front page, instead of the title “Youthful Truth,” it read: “Young Leninist.”

An explanation of what happened was given in the editorial below:

“Youthful Truth”… on the day of the death of our great leader renames itself “Young Leninist”. Under the sign of Ilyich, the newspaper will not only tell the truth about the life of Soviet youth, but also lead them along the Leninist path – to communism! (“Young Leninist” January 24, 1924)

The then editor N. Iordansky later recalled the urgent change of the name of the youth group:

“…In the editorial office there is a race. We are releasing the first issue of “Young Leninist”. I don’t know how it happened. Of course, with one thought, the welded one renamed the Moscow Committee “Youthful Truth” into “Young Leninist…”

That is, the idea of ​​​​giving a new, “Leninist” name to a newspaper popular among young people did not come from journalists, but from Komsomol workers.

However, the former newspaper name still did not disappear completely. For several months in 1924, on the front page of the newspaper, under the large printed title “Young Leninist,” there was placed—in brackets, in small print—the old title so familiar to all Komsomol members in the then Moscow and Moscow province: “Youthful Truth.” The last time he can be seen is in a newspaper issue dated November 6, 1924, and from the next issue, prepared for the next anniversary of the revolution, the capital’s youth got rid of this double name, finally becoming “Young Leninist”.

Under this name, the Komsomol printed organ existed in Moscow until May 31, 1928, when it was decided to temporarily stop publishing the newspaper.

By the way, the capital’s “Young Leninist” had “namesakes” from other regions of the country. In the archives we were able to find, for example, information that in 1925 a newspaper with exactly the same name was published in Kharkov. And in documents for 1929 there was a mention of the Lower Volga regional newspaper “Young Leninist”.

But when a little more than a year later, in the summer of 1929, the party leadership of the capital decided to resume the youth program, they chose a completely unique name for it. The same one that is so familiar to all of us – “Moskovsky Komsomolets”.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29201 dated January 24, 2024

Newspaper headline:
We’re a hundred again