Trud Digital Archive

Founded in 1921 in Moscow, Trud (Труд, Labor) was an influential Soviet newspaper and the official organ of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. Among the earliest Soviet newspapers with a countrywide circulation, it attracted some of the most important journalists and writers in the USSR. Among its regular contributors were such notable poets as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Although the newspaper was dedicated to covering issues concerning labor relations in the Soviet Union, economic analysis, the plight of workers in foreign countries, and the proliferation of official pronouncements, its more popular component attracted audiences from a broader pool of readers. At the height of the Gorbachev-era reforms the newspaper, like many others, would abandon its usual propagandistic bombast ensuring its growing popularity and catapulting its circulation to well over 20 million.

With the demise of the Soviet Union and the emergence of new publications in post-Soviet Russia that competed for readers from Trud’s targeted audiences, the popularity of the newspaper subsided, although it has retained some of its former reputation as a reliable source for news and popular culture reportage.