AbstractZubok's Zhivago's Children examines the rebirth of the Russian intelligentsia during the decades following Stalin's death. Zubok devotes particular attention to de-Stalinization and greater openness to the outside world that characterized the Khrushchev era. Leaders of the artistic as well as scientifi c intelligentsia sought to achieve a freer public life as well as greater autonomy and public infl uence for themselves. e Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 brought hopes for such an emancipated public life to an end until the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s. Zubok argues that the intelligentsia advisers that Gorbachev brought to power contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union.