ABSTRACT
Cultural de-Stalinisation came to an abrupt halt with Nikita Khrushchev's removal but the steps taken to reverse it were halting and incomplete. Hindsight has made it easy for later scholars to present Khrushchev's removal as a sort of Stalinist restoration in the sphere of culture and ideas. For Soviet leaders, many of the most disturbing developments in the cultural arena concerned not the high culture of literature and the fine arts, over which the regime retained fairly tight control, but in the sphere of popular cultural, particularly youth culture. The reaction of the Soviet intelligentsia to events in Czechoslovakia was a major shock to the leadership, which found that large numbers of party members in scientific institutes were openly refusing to vote in support of the invasion at party cell meetings. People like Vyacheslav Chornovil and Aleksandr Ginzburg began to submit to Soviet prosecutors documents concerning official actions that violated the Soviet constitution or Soviet laws.
