Professors and activists said the controversy surrounding the series might actually create a healthier attitude towards the Soviet Union, despite fears that "Amerika" presented a two-dimensional caricature of the nation.

"One of my largest concerns was that it would worsen the climate in this country for teaching about the Soviet Union to future generations," said Susan Alexander, executive director of Educators for Social Responsibility, a member of the coalition. "However, I think what's happening instead is that it's generating a very healthy, needed discussion in the country about our national attitude towards the Soviet Union in a nuclear world," she said.

Goldman, who criticized both the film and its political stance, said "people are talking about something more than the Bruins and the Celtics and the weather--for an educator, that's good." He added that "the Soviets complain that we don't know about them--well, this is doing it."

He also praised ABC's decision to broadcast excerpts from a similar Soviet film, called "TASS is Authorized to State"

The director of the Russian Research Center said Amerika's negative publicity might hurt future efforts to educate Americans about the Soviet Union. "I suspect very few networks will do [such a film] again. The problem is that they'll avoid the issue."

Mass Propaganda Alert charges that the network prepared this series in order to satisfy persistent right-wing critics of ABC's highly successful drama, "The Day After," a speculative depiction of nuclear holocaust in Kansas. Pipes said he also believed ABC created the series as compensation for earlier productions seen as left-leaning.

Butler termed the allegation "rubbish." According to him, "Initially the right wing wanted to take credit for it--until they saw it." They have since disowned the series "because it's too soft on the Russkies and too hard on the U.S. in suggesting that the occupation was our own fault," said the ABC spokesman.

"I would hope that it's not [politically] slanted at all," added Butler, noting that writer-producer Donald Wrye is a self-described "Kennedy Democrat."

Palomba and Pipes both said ABC had probably intended the series as non-political entertainment. "It's a money-maker--you don't spend $40 million just to appease the Right," said Palomba.

ABC claims that the show is about America, not about the Soviet Union. "As a writer [Wrye] set out to write a fiction. It could just as well have been about lizards, except CBS did it already--it was called "V," said Butler.

Pipes concurred--"The film is about the United States, not the Russians," he said. "The Russians force the Americans to reexamine themselves." He said the series' chief message "is not awareness of the Soviet threat--it's awareness of America's threat to itself. It says to Americans, `If you don't appreciate what you have, this is what will happen.'"

Few called the series realistic, and others said they worried that it might be seen as such.

"The whole notion of the United States being occupied by the Soviet Union is absurd--there are many dismal possibilities, but that's not one of them," said Ulam. He said the Soviet government would never choose to launch such a major invasion because "they have enough trouble with their own people."

Pipes defended the film, saying it was not meant to predict the future. However, he said such an invasion was possible and compared it to that of Czechoslovakia.

Russian Research Center fellow Philip Clendenning saw as "preposterous," the notion that America, with its widespread "pick-up truck mentality" and "Moral Majority types," could possibly succumb to the bloodless victory depicted.