Stories about the American frontier, such as those by Karl May and Jack London, had long been widely read in Central Europe; May's influence in particular was crucial to the Eastern European imagination of the American West. American Western films had been popular in Czech theatres throughout the history of the First Republic of Czechoslovakia, from its founding in 1918 until the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939. During the occupation and throughout Joseph Stalin's control of the Soviet Union, Westerns were banned. In the early 1960s, during Nikita Khrushchev's De-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, Westerns began to reappear in Czechoslovakia, with films such as "High Noon", "The Big Country", and "The Magnificent Seven" screened in theatres.