series’ highly varied historical and biographical narratives illustrate how Soviet writers and readers could subtly subvert conventional ideas of heroism and revolution, but also used late Soviet publications to reflect in myriad other ways on vexed questions of history, morality, and ideology

participation in the series was an important, yet overlooked, stage in the biographies of many key post-Stalinist writers, as they weighed up whether and how to stay within Soviet publishing

this book argues that this large-scale, unprecedented propaganda initiative reveals the depth and complexity of late Soviet anxieties about how to re-enthuse the population about revolution and socialism itsel