Rehabilitation
On December 23, 1954, during the Khrushchev thaw, a typed half sheet of paper ended the official silence. It read,
"The sentence of the military collegium dated 26 January 1940 concerning Babel, I.E., is revoked on the basis of newly discovered circumstances and the case against him is terminated in the absence of elements of a crime."
Babel's works were once again widely published and praised. His public rehabilitation as a writer was initiated with the help of his friend and admirer Konstantin Paustovsky, and a volume of Babel's selected works was published in 1957 with a laudatory preface by Ilya Ehrenburg. New collections of selected works by Babel were published in 1966, 1989 and 1990. Still, certain "taboo" parts such as mentions of Trotsky were censored until the Perestroika period shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The first collections of the complete works of Babel were prepared and published in Russia in 2002 and 2006.
Read more about this topic: Isaak Babel