Racy articles about celebrities and scandals bring big sales for papers like Komsomolskaya Pravda, right.

By ANNE BARNARD

MOSCOW - For decades, Komsomolskaya Pravda served up article after leaden article about Soviet officials meeting with other Soviet officials. Now, reinvented as a tabloid, the newspaper has a rowdier agenda - and a huge audience.
The paper’s most-read item one recent day was a verbal catfight between a celebrity radio hostess and Ksenia Sobchak, a model and reality TV star.
In the newspaper’s Moscow offices, a star correspondent was polishing an intrigue-filled opus on the death of the supermodel from Kazakhstan who jumped - or so the police said - from her Lower Manhattan balcony last month. The editor in chief was lukewarm on the photo of the model in her prime: Was there one that showed a little more leg?
A 27-year-old crime reporter thought he might have a big scoop, the ultimate Russian tear-jerker: A World War II veteran said he had been robbed of his medals. Better yet, the old soldier claimed to have served with the father of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin.
“We’ll run, before the competition beats us,” the reporter, Shamil Dzhemakulov, shouted to his anxious editor. “I have all the documents!”
The newspaper is part of a vibrant tabloid culture that illustrates the complex nature of Russian life under Mr. Putin. As long as they do not threaten the Kremlin or its closest friends, it seems, Russian newspapers can be as raucous as they like.
For papers like Komsomolskaya Pravda, which sells more copies than any other Russian newspaper, the country’s recent rollback of press freedoms is largely beside the point.
Their investigative journalism tends toward exposes of incompetent police work, corrupt low-level officials and dirty train stations, everyday problems Russians care about. And their standard fare of scandal, entertainment and “news you can use” represents a normalization of sorts in a country that for years was too poor to develop a consumer culture and too caught up with political turmoil to dwell on celebrity gossip.
Founded in 1925 as the organ of the Komsomol, the Communist Party’s youth movement, Komsomolskaya Pravda has kept only its name from the Soviet past. Now, its everyday themes would not be out of place in the tabloids of New York or London.
Its most-feared competitor for Moscow readers, Moskovsky Komsomolets, is another former Communist organ that now specializes in acidly written crime briefs. A national rival, Zhizn, is modeled on Fleet Street’s The Sun.
Publishers like theirs have decided that Russian society is tired of politics and has turned its attention to more mundane topics like shopping and family life.
A few investigative newspaper reporters still regularly confront the Kremlin. But their work is dangerous - several, like Anna Politkovskaya, have died in mysterious circumstances - and their publications, compared with the tabloids, sell poorly.
That contrast has earned the tabloids some resentment.
“Komsomolskaya Pravda has absolutely no relation to freedom of the press,” said Aleksei K. Simonov, founder of the Glasnost Defense Foundation, a Moscow-based organization that monitors press freedom. “It doesn’t trouble them at all.”
He said the tabloids might be fun but that, like celebrity obsessions in other countries, they distract readers from fundamental issues, like the country’s lack of effective political opposition and persistent social problems.
But Vladimir Sungorkin, Komsomolskaya Pravda’s editor and general director, says his circulation numbers support his strategy. “If we cover high culture, people will run away,” Mr. Sungorkin said.“Leo Tolstoy, we won’t come close to.”