It was issued as a reaction to the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and to the rising centralist aspirations within the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.
Most of the contributors called for the establishment of a sovereign, democratic and pluralist Slovene state, although direct demands for independence were not uttered.
The editors of Nova revija were called to defend themselves in a state-sponsored public discussion, organized by the Socialist Alliance of the Working People.
The editorial board was forced to step down, but no public prosecution was conducted against any of the authors, and the journal could continue issuing without restrictions.
The publications is usually considered as the direct prelude of the so-called Slovene Spring, a mass political movement for democratization that started the following year by protests against the Ljubljana trial against four journalists arrested by the Yugoslav military police.