Communist Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev praised the powerful imagery of some of the pages but stated that the novel was "false at its base".[2] Khrushchev also complained that Dudintsev had "biasedly scissored out negative facts for tendentious presentation from an unfriendly angle."[3] Others joined in: Dudintsev was accused of vilifying Soviet society and his book of being a social evil.