ABSTRACT
Sometimes, publishing a book is like missing a train. That was the experience of the publishing house Sovetskii pisatel' when it released Natal'ia Baranskaia's Memorial Day (Den' pomiMveniia) in 1989. The book did not become one of the (rare) hits of perestroika. And there is a good chance that it will be forgotten even before it has had a chance to be acknowledged: it was not launched by the usual "thick journal" version and its print run was a relatively modest 30,000 copies. The "retrospective" theme of the book did not correspond, as we shall see, to what was generally supposed to be remembered in the late 1980s, in what was still the Soviet Union.
