[2] A prominent member of the influential 1970s–1980s derevenschiki movement, Belov's best known novels include Business as Usual (Привычное дело, 1966), Eves (Кануны, 1972–1987), The Best is Yet to Come (Всё впереди, 1986) and The Year of a Major Breakdown (Год великого перелома, 1989–1994).

Vasily Belov was a harsh critic of the Soviet rural policies (particularly collectivization), which he felt were dominated by the cosmopolitan doctrines aiming at repressing the Russian national identity.

[3] Even detractors, though, praised Vasily Belov's tough stance on ecological issues and his activities aimed at restoration of the old Russian historic sites and churches.

[2] Vasily Ivanovich Belov was born in Timonikha, Kharovsky District, Northern Krai, now Vologda Oblast, into a peasant family, the eldest of five children.

[7] It was the novella Privychnoye delo (Business as Usual, 1966) published by Sever magazine, that made Belov a well-known author, its main character Ivan Africanovich soon becoming the village prose movement's token figure.

Business as Usual was miles apart from the standards of Socialist realism, and the magazine's editor Dmitry Gusarov even had to place the "To be concluded" tag in the end of it to appease censors who felt the story's finale was "too pessimistic".

[3] It was followed in 1968 by the Carpenter Tales short stories collection (published in Aleksandr Tvardovsky's Novy Mir) and then Vologda Bukhtinas (1969) a set of modern local folklore pieces.

This epic trilogy, telling the tragic story of three peasant families, became arguably the strongest statement against collectivization in the non-dissident Soviet literature, exploring what the author saw as the conflict between Russian rural traditionalism and the Bolsheviks-imposed 'rootlessness', the latter leading to chaos, mass murder and degradation.