They further taught us that the United States was unable to bring Japan to her knees and called upon Russia for help, whereupon the Red Army promptly brought about a surrender by crushing the Japanese Kuantung Army of a million men in Mongolia. The first American Atomic bombs which fell upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dismissed as insignificant while compared with the Soviet strength. The communists were as thorough as possible with this one-sided distortion of the facts, too thorough to be believable.

Not even the little children could bring themselves to believe that the Russians were entirely perfect. By the time a child was nine or ten he began to realize that he was being cheated out of a real education. The disciplines that had been imposed since the start of his schooling kept him from open revolt, and he continued to parrot communist teachings, but resentment had begun to make him reject much of what he was taught. An anecdote indicates the spirit of those years:

A teacher, quizzing his pupil, asked, "Who is your father?"

Child: My father is Stalin.

Teacher: Very good. And who is your mother?

Child: My mother is Rakosi.

Teacher: Fine, fine, and what do you wish to become?

Child: A war orphan!

Equally as ridiculous as communist historical exaggerations were the claims made for Russia's fabulous inventors. These credited Popov with the discovery of the radio and made Marconi only a thief who profitted from the fruit of Popov's searches. Zhukovskij, the "father of flying," replaced the Wright brothers, Edison also bowed out before a Russian, and so on until every epochal inventive laurel was redistributed.

It was the same in other subjects. In geography we studied about America for one hour, about Russia for a complete school year. In literature we heard about Solohov, Gorki, Fagejev and Majakovski, but very little about Shakespeare, Moliere, Dante or Goethe. Even the Russian classicists, Tolstoy, Dotoevski or Pushkin were dismissed as minor figures.

Communist literature itself suffered from a paucity of great creativeness largely because the writers had only five acceptable themes with which to work. The first deals with the preparation of the revolution, the resultant communist victory, and World War II. The miserable life before the revolution is described, followed by the awakening to selfconsciousness, the spreading of new ideas among the working classes and their fight for the communist future in which they allegedly believe. The fight is a class struggle between the exploiters and the exploited people, i.e., between capitalists and communists. The stories of the second world war belong in this group because according to communist ideology (as expressed by Dimitrov: "Fascism is the overt, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance-capitalism."), they were fighting against the unmasked capitalists during World War II.

The second theme involves the struggle to build communist industry and the new socialist society, and the fight against "base class enemies," usually American hirelings, who want to undermine the communist paradise by sabotage and direct destruction. Stories of this type are designed to convince the people of the legality of communism and to thwart so-called "bourgeois rudiments" and "drawbacking tendencies," including religion and God.

The third theme was the blind apotheosis and weaving of a cult around the "beloved communist leaders," especially Lenin and Stalin. This cult was intended to supplant the belief in God, and the cultists went so far on this path that they vested the Red leaders with almost supernatural characteristics.

Life in capitalist countries was subject matter for a fourth theme. Usually set in America, these stories claimed that "every honest man is a communist and the rule is in the hands of Wall Street. There is an ever-sharpening class struggle which will reach its climax in the communist world revolution in the capitalist countries."

A fifth and favorite theme of communist authors was the comparison between life in capitalist countries and in the communist "paradise."