"I'd Be Honest If They'd Let Me" [is a story about an] ordinary Soviet citizen who is thwarted by the System and holds out against it in the name of his integrity as a man and a worker….

This story … appeared in Novy Mir, just at the time Khrushchev was cracking down on the liberal writers, many of whom, like Voinovich, were trying to renovate socialist realism by replacing the standard "positive" hero with a human one whose true circumstances do not generally appear in Pravda. In the "cultural conferences" that were staged to call the liberals to account, "I'd Be Honest If They'd Let Me" was singled out by Ilychev, Khrushchev's chief ideologist and hatchetman, as being particularly odious and dangerous.

Voinovich's defense of the story claimed that though its hero finds himself fighting alone against "irregularities," its point was that "every human being has an aim...