College Elementary School

            I think about "Long Live Mighty Russia"  [hear it now! and "Meadowlands" which we sang in Hall Sing: The Russians were heroes to the American people until well  after the the Potsdam Conference in August 1945, where the Allies formally handed over large parts of Poland, Finland, Romania, Germany, and the Balkans to Stalin, as a reward for the string of massive Soviet victories that were chiefly responsible for concluding the war in Europe. Nor did Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech in March 1946  the following year even begin to put an end to American euphoria or naivety about Stalin's aims.

            In the fifth grade in 1946 we were thus still looking with some wonder at heavily and beautifully illustrated Soviet propaganda, which was available everywhere in the US and suggested that the mass of Russians lived lives of bucolic bliss in a country where it was mild mid-summer all year long.

 (I think the inspiration came mainly from the wonderful chapter in Anna Karenina where Lyovin joins the peasants on his estate in hay-making.) Skepticism had set in, of course, and was being fed by a few writers like Koestler and Orwell.

           
A couple of years later skepticism had turned into hostility. in the Sheepsheds

 

in 1949, for example, the eighth grade---i.e, the sixth grade of 1947---put on a debate in which the question was something like "Resolved: That the United States should immediately declare war on Russia."

The negative won, in my recollection, but not without a struggle nor without the very rational suggestion that in such a war the US would be very likely to lose. Even some of us were aware that the Japanese had occupied and held the Aleutians, now part of the state of Alaska, for a time.