In the early 1960s it seemed that nearly every young Soviet writer of short stories was preoccupied with the conflict between his own generation and that of his parents. To some extent they were simply writing about a familiar psychological phenomenon that was by no means limited to this particular time and place – the feeling of young people that their parents represent an establishment that is trying to rob them of their individuality, to buy them out with communal protections. One of the teenagers in Vasili Aksenov's A Starry Ticket, talking to his older brother, puts it this way:

The “conflict between the generations,” however, also had more local and immediate aspects of both a moral and ideological nature. Living in the aftermath of Stalinism, young people realized that their parents had allowed themselves to be duped, cowed, and to some extent shaped by a regime that was now declared to have been badly tainted.