Published in 1979 and expanded in 1982, Ales' Adamovich and Daniil Granin's collection of oral histories and diaries, A Book of the Blockade (Blokadnaia kniga), came as a revelation. Never before had the darker sides of the blockade been treated so fully and unflinchingly in print in the Soviet Union. Still, in 1982 – five years before Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika – much remained unspoken. A decade later, the editors recalled that the censor had “made over sixty removals in the first half of the book.” Specifically, the censor objected to materials relating to “the facts of cannibalism and the postwar repression affecting the former defenders of the city.”

By 1992, both the censor and the Soviet Union had been consigned to the dustbin of history, and Adamovich and Granin considered filling in the blank spots. They had no compunctions about revealing the crimes of the former regime, but they expressed hesitation about publishing interviews that talked of cannibalism. Clearly willing to attack the pieties of the propaganda state, why did they question their “right to disclose” the stories of cannibalism that survivors told them?