Zalygin's mother, Lyubov Timofeevna Zalygina (Abkin), was a daughter of a bank employee from the town of Krasny Kholm, Tver Province.

From 1970, after the dispersal of the editorial office of Novy Mir and the resignation of Tvardovsky, and until 1986, Zalygin refused to be published in the magazine out of solidarity.

His biographer Igor Dedkov wrote that Tropy Altaya was "an introduction to the philosophy...on which all the main books of Zalygin were built".

He signed a letter written by a group of Soviet writers to the editorial of the Pravda newspaper on August 31, 1973, denunciating Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov; he was also one of the people who condemned the Metropol almanach in 1979.

In 1967, Solyonaya Pad’ (Salt Ravine), a novel about the events of the civil war in Siberia, based on various historical documents, which Zalygin collected for several years working in the archives, was published.

In it, the image of a fanatic-communist is opposed by the main character – the peasant leader Meshcheryakov (his prototype was the partisan commander E. M. Mamontov).

In 1986, Zalygin became editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir monthly, which, under him, began to play an important role in Mikhail Gorbachev’s politics of glasnost’.

The Humble Cemetery and Stroybat by Sergei Kaledin, Odlyan, or the Air of Freedom by Leonid Gabyshev, the journalistic pieces on the Chernobyl catastrophe by G. U. Medvedev, Advances and Debts by the economist N. P. Shmelev were also published there.

[7] At the same time, being the head of a prestigious monthly that stood by its "non-partisan" position (politically and aesthetically), he could refuse to publish even renowned authors, causing their resentment (such was the case with the famous Russian writer and former Soviet dissident Vladimir Voinovich, who later called Zalygin a "conformist" for it[8]).

– Back in my day I had worked in the region as hydroengineer, and I could clearly visualize the enormous devastation which a water reservoir of 132,000 square kilometers would have brought about".

A key turning point in the debate came with the news of massive oil discoveries in the Lower Ob’ basin, but even after that the entrenched hydropower lobby would not yield up easily.

Zalygin's articles elucidating the situation were published in one of the leading Soviet newspapers and drew public attention to the problem, converting the opinion of the administration managers.

The fight ended in 1963, when a government decree ruled in favor of oil and gas over hydropower as the main priority in West Siberia.

The campaign was successful, and Zalygin regarded it as an evidence of new possibilities for democratic interference in the ecological policies of the state, unheard-of in the Soviet years.

But soon his optimism about the ecological policies of the state and public role in decision-taking of the Perestroyka years gave way to disillusionment and dismay.

Most notable books in Russian available on https://www.litmir.me/a/?id=12759 : S. Zalygin's works have been translated into English, French, German, Armenian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Chinese, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Georgian, Japanese, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Korean, Chinese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Mongolian, Polish, Romanian, Slovakian, Swedish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.