The death of Stalin and the ensuing Thaw provided an opportunity for revisions in Soviet citizens' conceptions of the past. Not only were writers given permission to make available new facts about and interpretations of the Stalin years; they were, for a time, mandated to do so. The authorities' immediate aim was to destroy the “cult of personality,” to release creative energies that had been pent up during the decades of one-man rule, and to attribute the mass suffering and injustice of those decades to Stalin himself.

Several unplanned and unexpected developments resulted. Some writers, for example, chose not to write about the Stalin years but about previous periods of Russian history in the light of more flexible interpretations than those previously permitted. At times, these recastings of historical trends, personalities, and events simply provided cultural enrichment by adding new facts and attacking myths, and at others they made implicit or allegorical reference to the present. In addition, many authors, while ostensibly writing about the period of the “cult,” were obviously aware, without mentioning the fact, that they were depicting evils still endemic, and even organic, to contemporary Soviet society. The new literature about the past, then, became to a great extent a literature of pretending, in which candor about the present was thinly covered by a veil of retrospection.

A composite plot summary of the typical novel in this vein would go something like this: the young hero, who entered the army as a mere boy and grew up under combat conditions in World War II, is either still at the front or recently demobilized.