It was written over three decades, between 1935 and 1961.[1] She carried it with her, redrafting, as she worked and lived in towns and cities across the Soviet Union. The set of poems was conspicuously absent from her collected works, given its explicit condemnation of the purges. The work in Russian finally appeared in book form in Munich in 1963, the whole work not published within the USSR until 1987.[2][3] It would become the best known poetry work about Soviet Great Terror.