The Young Guard was the second most popular work of children's literature in the Soviet Union for the period 1918–1986, with total sales over 276 editions of 26,143,000 copies.
Immediately afterward, exhumation began of several dozen corpses of members of the Young Guard underground resistance organization from a pit at the Number Five Mine in Krasnodon, who had been tortured before execution by the Germans.
[3] Fadeyev, after reviewing materials collected by the Commission of the Central Committee of the Komsomol Krasnodon, agreed to the project and immediately went to the scene.
Fadeev spent most of September 1943 in Krasnodon, collecting materials and interviewing more than a hundred witnesses (although many parents of Young Guards were too heartsick to speak to him).
[3] A few months later, Fadeyev published the article "Immortality" in Pravda, then – shocked and captivated by the Young Guards story – set his pen to work for a year and a half to create a large multidisciplinary artistic novel.
Pieces offering serious ideological criticism of Fadeev appeared in Pravda, the mouthpiece of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and thus of Stalin himself.
Study of the novel began in the fifth grade; the literary curriculum for the second semester was built on literature as a call to action, beginning with Lermontov's Borodino through excerpts of War and Peace, Gorky's My Childhood and many others, with four lessons on The Young Guard included.
[1] By the end of the 1980s the novel was seen as part of the ideological mainstream, and the novel's non-fictitious characters were awarded with medals and streets named after them in various cities, and meetings were held demanding that the traitors who betrayed the Young Guards be found and severely punished (it is generally assumed that the Young Guard was broken with the aid of local informants, although who this has never been determined).
According to Georgi Arutyuniantz, a Young Guard survivor, Fadeyev told him: [As to] why the novel in some places breaks with history, and combines the roles of some individuals...
In 1993, a special commission which had been formed to study the history of the Young Guard gave a press conference in Luhansk (described in Isvestia 12 May 1993).