Novy Mir has been published in Moscow since January 1925. It was modeled on the popular pre-
Soviet literary magazine
Mir Bozhy ("God's World"), which was published from 1892 to 1906, and its follow-up,
Sovremenny Mir ("Contemporary World"), which was published from 1906 to 1917. Before 1960,
Novy Mir mainly published prose that supported the general line of the
Communist Party.
Ivan Gronsky became editor-in-chief of the magazine in 1931, and he began the practice of printing a portrait of Stalin and a poem to his glory in almost every issue. However, Gronsky was arrested in 1937 and replaced by
Vladimir Stavsky. In the April 13, 1946, meeting of the
Politburo,
Joseph Stalin said
Novy Mir was the USSR's worst literary magazine, beating out
Zvezda for the top spot. Between 1947 and 1991, the magazine was an organ of the
Union of Soviet Writers. In the early 1960s,
Novy Mir changed its political stance, leaning to a
dissident position. In November 1962 the magazine became famous for publishing
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's groundbreaking
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novella about a prisoner of the
Gulag. In the same year its circulation was about 150,000 copies a month. The magazine continued publishing controversial articles and stories about various aspects of Soviet and Russian history despite the fact that its editor-in-chief,
Alexander Tvardovsky, facing
significant political pressure, resigned in February 1970. With the appointment of
Sergey Zalygin in 1986, at the beginning of
perestroika, the magazine practised increasingly bold criticism of the
Soviet government, including figures such as
Mikhail Gorbachev. It also published fiction and poetry by previously banned writers, such as
George Orwell,
Joseph Brodsky and
Vladimir Nabokov. ==Editors-in-chief==