This essay examines newspaper narratives depicting model youth in Komsomol'skaya Pravda in the early 1960s in order to cast light on the Party-state's efforts in the Khrushchev years to use the press as a means of re-energising the drive to forge model communist citizens. In contrast to most studies of Soviet media, this study offers a glimpse of the reception of official signals, by drawing on sociological studies that Komsomol'skaya Pravda conducted of its readers in the early 1960s. Throughout, the paper explores recent scholarly discussions of resistance, conformism and agency in the Soviet context.