Leino returned to the public eye in 1958 with his memoirs of his time as Minister of the Interior, which were due to be published by Tammi.
The manuscript was prepared in secret – even most of the Tammi staff were kept in ignorance – but the project was revealed by Leino because of an indiscretion just before the planned publication.
The Soviet Union's Chargé d'Affaires in Finland Ivan Filippov (Ambassador Viktor Lebedev had suddenly departed from Finland a few weeks earlier on 21 October 1958) demanded that Prime Minister Karl-August Fagerholm's government prevent the release of Leino's memoirs.
Later the same day Fagerholm called the Tammi publisher, Untamo Utrio, and it was decided that the January launch of the book was to be cancelled.
Deputy director of Tammi Jarl Hellemann later argued that the fuss about the book was completely disproportionate to its substance, describing the incident as the first instance of Finnish self-censorship motivated by concerns about relations to the Soviet Union (see Finlandization).