During the Soviet era, Komsomolskaya Pravda was an all-union newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Komsomol. Established in accordance with a decision of the 13th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, it first appeared on 24 May 1925 in an edition of 31,000 copies. Komsomolskaya Pravda began as the official organ of the Communist Union of Youth, or Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. As such, it targeted the same 14 to 28 demographic as its parent organization, focusing initially on popular science and adventure articles while teaching the values of the CPSU. During this period, it was twice awarded the Order of Red Banner of Labour, and was also the recipient of the Order of Lenin, of the Order of the October Revolution, and of the Order of the Patriotic War. As the Soviet Union started to collapse, on 1 December 1990 the paper shifted from serving as a Komsomol mouthpiece to become a Russian nationwide daily tabloid newspaper. During the 1991 August Putsch, the paper was banned by the State Committee of the State of Emergency, or "Gang of Eight", and did not publish from 19 to 20 August - the first time in its history that it failed to appear on schedule. Nevertheless, on 21 August the newspaper published a complete chronicle of the coup as a historical document. The paper is owned by Media Partner, which in turn is owned by ESN Group, an energy company led by :ru:Берёзкин, Григорий Викторович|Grigory Berezkin, who has close links to Gazprom. In December 2000 the Norwegianmedia companyA-Pressen bought 25 percent plus one share of the paper. It is published in tabloid format by "Izdatelsky Dom Komsomolskaya Pravda". Komsomolskaya Pravda reached its highest circulation in 1990 when it sold almost 22 million daily copies. In 2001 it was the ninth-top European newspaper with a circulation of 785,000 copies. It was the top-selling newspaper in Russia in 2006 with daily circulation ranging from 700,000 to 3.1 million copies. Its March 2008 circulation, certified by the NCS, was 660,000 copies and it was the most read paper in the country based on the findings by the TNS Gallup Media. In the same year the online version of the paper was also the most visited news website. In January 2015 a front-page article in Komsomolskaya Pravda suggested that the United States had orchestrated the Charlie Hebdo shooting. In May 2017, columnist Alisa Titko went viral for writing that the English city ofManchester was "full of fat people" and that she found the sight of same-sex love "disgusting".
A "European" edition, aimed in particular at the Russian diaspora in Germany, as well as Russian-speaking tourists on the Croatian Adriatic coast, is distributed in several EU countries, while a special Baltic-region edition is also available in Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. A number of similar, but independently owned, newspapers can be found in other member or associate-member states of the Commonwealth of Independent States :
In January-May 2020 the website kp.ru was one of the most popular and reliable sources in Russian Wikipedia. According to Alexa, the website kp.ru is the 38th most popular website in Russia.
