NOTE: PERMANENT PRIVATE STATUS; DO NOT RELEASE FILE OR RECORD; DO NOT CATALOG. Author used real names in the dissertation, and subjects were alive at the time of submission. Contact the Graduate School dissertation editor with questions. - 7/19/13 - Shari Hill In my dissertation, I offer the first comprehensive portrait of the late Soviet scientific intelligentsia, one of the most important professional groups in post-Stalinist Russia. I argue that, after Stalin's death, the Soviet government was sometimes willing to allow - and even encouraged - autonomous thinking and actions among certain privileged groups of Soviet society — scientists above all — in order to infuse new life into the Soviet project. This was especially true under Khrushchev, whose Communist idealism, elitism, and absolute faith in the modernizing power of science and technology provided Soviet scientists with opportunities which were otherwise unthinkable in a rigidly centralized state. To support my argument, I examine the case study of Chernogolovka, a formerly closed scientific town, located thirty-five miles northeast of Moscow. I focus on the first generation of Chernogolovkian scientists, and tell their story against the background of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Making use of oral and archival sources, I examine scientists' participation in the construction of the town and their everyday experiences in the 1960s and the 1970s, their formation in the 1930s and coming of age during late Stalinism and the thaw. I look at their travels to the West and how these affected their worldviews. I investigate scientists? attitudes toward dissent and dissidents, and their relationship with the Communist Party and ideology. I argue that Soviet leaders saw the scientific intelligentsia as one of the pillars of the post-Stalinist regime, and that scientists, in return, were deeply invested in the construction of Communism in the Soviet Union.