[4] Early books published by Raduga included Moydodyr (Wash'em Clean) and Tarakanishche (The Monster Cockroach)[5][6] by Korney Chukovsky, who would become one of the most popular children's poets in the Russian language,[7] and Morozhenoe (Ice Cream), Pozhar!

Despite Kliachko having little prior knowledge of poetry and almost no capital invested in his firm, Moydodyr and Tarakanishche were "enormous successes" with print runs of 7,000 in both cases.

[9] Building on these success, Raduga was able to attract contributions from some of the most talented Russian writers (Agnaia Barto, Vitaly Bianki, L. I. Borisova, Korney Chukovsky, Elena Danko, Samuil Marshak, Evgeny Schwartz, and Boris Zhitkov) and artists (Y. P. Annenkov, Sergey Chekhonin, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Vladimir Konashevich, Eduard Krimmer, Boris Kustodiev, Vladimir Lebedev, Alexei Radakov, Sergeii Rakhmanin, Konstantin Rudakov, Mikhail Tsekhanovskii, and V. S. Tvardovskii) of the time.

[1] On top of this official disapproval, the firm was experiencing increased financial difficulties and restricted access to printing presses which as a private company it was not permitted to own.

In 1927, the Committee of Children’s Literature prohibited Raduga from reprinting 81% of its backlist, claiming those books were "contaminated by harmful bourgeois ideology".