In the 1930s, Antokolsky worked as a director at the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow. During World War II, he ran a front theatre and was awarded a Stalin Prize for a long poem about the Germans killing his son. After the war, he managed a theatre in Tomsk. His poem, "All we who in his name..." was written in 1956, the year of Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech" condemning Stalinism, and widely circulated among student groups in the 1950s.