The Tartu-Moscow school of cultural semiotics is born out of cultural discontinuity. The innovative schools of the 1920s and 1930s were partly liquidated, partly forgotten, and it was only during the political thaw (1954-1968) that their works began to be republished and used again. The works were published in various languages, both in the Soviet Union and in the West. The development of cultural semiotics was influenced by M. Bakhtin and his circle, J. Tynyanov and formalist school, V. K. Bakhtin, V. Propp, L. Vygotsky, S. Eisenstein, J. Linzbach and many others. After 1968, the public use of these authors and their works became problematic again, and various techniques had to be invented to overcome the cultural discontinuity. As a scientific problem, this meant the need to make the scientific legacy of cultural semiotics almost invisible. The covert use of sources, the justification of  predecessors' works and views, and the pseudo-criticism of their work were all employed. The aim of this presentation is to show how this scientific legacy shaped the School as an invisible college through its members and to show how the Tartu-Moscow School, as an invisible college in all its diversity, tried to form a conceptual whole and a coherent disciplinary cultural semiotics.