Translated fiction proved instrumental to create a sense of community within newspaper readerships. A particular illustrative case are Dutch newspaper’s translations of Russian literature during the Interbellum. At different levels, the selection and translation of serialized Russian fiction was instrumental for newspapers. Readers were enticed to subscribe or buy a daily copy to read the next episode, doing so newspapers increased customer loyalty. At the same time the readership was provided with ideologically deemed appropriate content. Both features added up to build a community of readers. Cast against an emerging mass democracy and the pillarizing of society, newspapers were influential vectors of social change. A comparison of practices used in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s by conservative newspapers on the one hand, and left-wing newspapers on the other hand, shows that similar strategies were applied when publishing Russian fiction. Both newspapers used Russian fiction to position themselves vis à vis the social and political discussions of the era, partly drawing on similar authors, but translating and presenting their oeuvre convergent with the newspaper’s ideological orientation. Apart from these manipulations, discursive practices (are readers perceived as clients or as subjects that needed to be politically educated?) are interesting to assess the relationship with the readership. Drawing on an extensive corpus of translated Russian fiction in Dutch newspapers in a larger timeframe allows me to assess the situation in the decades before and after the interbellum, and to relate topical questions about newspapers as communities of readers to the broader context. To decrypt data on serial fiction I draw on Periodical codes (Philpotts 2012). This tool incorporates metadata relating translations to the publishing context and, more specifically, the ideological orientation of periodicals. Periodical codes are complementary with product-oriented Descriptive Translation Studies (Özmen 2019; Tahir Gürçağlar ...