[1][2] It has published many great Russian authors throughout its history, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Ivan Bunin or Osip Mandelstam.

However, this plan has been described by one modern commentator as "too grandly conceived and poorly administered" to succeed, whilst the original strategy of concentrating on selling textbooks failed to make an entry into the new market as the émigrés "did not buy that kind of literature."

Further, hopes of the YMCA Press entering the Russian domestic market itself were dashed when their production of Russian-language versions of Göschen's until then ever-popular series of scientific pamphlets failed to make an impact in the 1920s.

[8] One of the first books to actually carry the imprint of the YMCA Press was Aleksandr Semonovich Iashchenko [ru]'s anthology of contemporary Russian religion, and this marked the first shift from publishing textbooks to religious pieces.

[7] A combination of entering the market for publishing fiction, as well as the subsidy provided the press by its parent company, enabled it to establish itself as the primary source of intellectual literature for European Russians[1] in the longer term.

[11] During these first years, YMCA-Press published : Vasilij Zenkovsky, Nicolas Troubetskoï, Konstantin Motchulski, Semyon Frank, Ivan Iljin, Nikolay Lossky, Father Sergei Bulgakov, Lev Karsavin, Gueorgy Fedotov ...

Between 1900 and 1940 the YMCA Press was led by Julius Hecker, Paul B. Anderson, and Nikolai Berdyaev; they were followed, at the end of World War II, by Donald Lowrie, Ivan Morozov and Nikita Struve.

[9] Before the Second World War, YMCA-Press also published exiled Russian writers such as Marc Aldanov, Nina Berberova, Ivan Bunin, Vladislav Khodassevich, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Aleksey Remizov, Mikhaïl Ossorguine, Boris Zaytsev ...

This was the first unabridged version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, and was followed in 1973 (for which it received "worldwide attention") by his three-volume of The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956, which sold 50,000 copies in its first few weeks of sale.

Back in 1971, Alexandre Solzhenitsyn, then behind the Iron Curtain, entrusted the publishing house YMCA-Press with the edition of his August 14, the first part of his monumental historical work The Red Wheel.

[13] In 1975, Solzhenitsyn visited the company's Parisian office, where he met the former head of YMCA-Press, Nikita Struve and the staff, received an invitation to the United States by Anderson, and presented the latter with a book.

[3] For ten years, thanks to the help of generous donors and the French Embassy in Moscow, YMCA-Press will crisscross Russia and endow a hundred cities with the complete collection of its editions, also organizing conferences and meetings with the former Soviet population long deprived of this Russian literary heritage by censorship.