In November 1962 the magazine became famous for publishing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's groundbreaking One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novella about a prisoner of the Gulag.

[5] The magazine continued publishing controversial articles and stories about various aspects of Soviet and Russian history despite the fact that its editor-in-chief, Alexander Tvardovsky, facing significant political pressure, resigned in February 1970.

With the appointment of Sergey Zalygin in 1986, at the beginning of perestroika, the magazine practised increasingly bold criticism of the Soviet government, including figures such as Mikhail Gorbachev.

It also published fiction and poetry by previously banned writers, such as George Orwell, Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Nabokov.

In the 2000s, the following authors have been published: Maxim Amelin, Arkadi Babchenko, Dmitry Bak, Vladimir Berezin, Dmitry Bykov, Dmitry Danilov, Vladimir Gandelsman, Alisa Ganieva, Alexander Ilichevsky, Alexander Karasyov, Leonid Kostyukov, Yuri Kublanovsky, Alexander Kushner, Yulia Latynina, Vladimir Makanin, Anatoly Nayman, Yevgeni Popov, Zakhar Prilepin, Valery Pustovaya, Sergey Soloukh, Andrei Volos, Oleg Yermakov and others.