Released in 1954, in 1956 he was rehabilitated. Still an optimist and believer in the ideals of communism, during the Khrushchev Thaw he restored his Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) membership. From 1957–1969 he taught in the Moscow Institute of Polygraphy and the Institute of History of Arts. It was Kopelev who approached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, editor of the top Soviet literary journal, the "Novy Mir" (New World) to urge publication of Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich".