On 5 March 1953, Soviet radio broadcast a report that struck the novelist and journalist Il'ia Erenburg as inconceivable. More than ten years later he recalled, “We had long lost sight of the fact that Stalin was mortal. He had become an all-powerful and remote deity. And now the deity had died of a cerebral hemorrhage.” The next day incredulity gave way to uncertainty, if not dread: “What would happen now?” A month later, a previously unimaginable story was published in Pravda; “it was broadcast, it was said openly for all the world to hear.” Erenburg emphasized that an unprecedented revelation produced an incredible twist in the Doctors' Plot: The mostly Jewish doctors were released, and the investigator arrested. In the same month, April 1953, Erenburg began the novel whose title – The Thaw – became shorthand for the decade of political and cultural liberalization that followed Stalin's death. The state's new story encouraged Erenburg to write a new story of his own, one that broached taboo subjects – notably Soviet anti-Semitism and the insincerity of Soviet art – and thereby “caused a tremendous stir.”

For Erenburg, stories – the state's and his own – played a central role in defining the thaw.