Classified by some critics as a dissident writer, yet condemned by his fellow dissidents for his complicity with the Komissariat gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti (KGB, State Security Committee), Anatolii Kuznetsov is best known for his Babii Iar: Roman-dokument (1967; translated as Babi Yar: A Documentary Novel, 1967), which tells the story of the Nazi massacre of Jews outside Kiev. As a whole, Kuznetsov's writings are remarkable more for their subject matter than for their literary form, and the quality of his literary output is likewise overshadowed by the details of his biography. Kuznetsov's fate as a writer illustrates the unsettled period in Soviet society known as the "Thaw," generally understood as a period of relative truthfulness and openness in Soviet literature. The period of the Thaw was ushered in soon after the death of Joseph Stalin on 5 March 1953 and was strengthened by Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress, in...