Becoming the editor in 1986, during Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, Baklanov published the works that were previously banned by Soviet censors; his drive for glasnost boosted the magazine's circulation to 1 million copies.

Soviet critics attacked Baklanov for describing events from an ordinary soldier's perspective, a depiction that conflicted with the propagandist official version of the war.

[3] In his 1964 novel July 1941, Baklanov was among the first to reveal that Stalin’s purge of the Red Army during the 1930s was responsible for Soviet unpreparedness for war, which resulted in millions dying and being captured.

Almost all the boys went to the front, but I was the only one to return alive… I wanted people living now to care about them as friends, as family, as brothers.” Translated into English by Antonina Bouis, Forever Nineteen was described in The New York Times as a “piercing account of a Russian soldier’s experiences during World War II,” which “belongs on a shelf next to, say … Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.” [4] Forever Nineteen was translated into scores of languages and earned Baklanov the USSR State Prize.

The novel The Moment Between the Past and the Future (Russian title––Svoi chelovek, 1990), translated into English by Catherine Porter, portrays the end of Leonid Brezhnev’s stagnation era, which preceded Gorbachev’s perestroika.

It published a number of previously suppressed works, such as Mikhail Bulgakov’s novella Heart of a Dog, Alexander Tvardovsky’s poem By Right of Memory, Vasily Grossman’s travel account An Armenian Sketchbook, Georgi Vladimov’s novel Faithful Ruslan, etc.

Baklanov referred to this war as a “political adventure” (it was then officially described as a Soviet international mission) and demanded to call those responsible to account.

[6] In 1994, Baklanov appealed to President Boris Yeltsin in an article in Izvestia, urging him to use diplomacy to prevent Russia's war with Chechnya.

In 1993, Baklanov signed the Letter of Forty-Two, an appeal by prominent intellectuals to President Yeltsin and the Russian government whom they urged to ban propaganda of communism, ultra-nationalism and racism.

The novella ends symbolically: a gang of Russian neo-fascists attacks and kills the main protagonist, a veteran of World War II.