I stand under an overhang as the class of 2014 or so stream home in flowing ankle-high rainwaters. The scene is black and white, like a Jean Luc Goddard movie popular when I was their age where the actor sees children running across his vision and we know he sees his younger himself. So it is this day. I am auditing History 419, History of the Soviet Union.

I had been here before. In 1967 in a lecture in Bascom Hall Professor Michael Petrovich taught a different Soviet History. Five years earlier the Cuban Missile Crisis; two years previous the battle of Ia Drang Valley: in Washington, D.C., a Navy code clerk name John Walker offered Washington, D.C. KGB Station Chief Solomatin US Navy codes; 700,000 US Troops were learning jungle combat in Vietnam.
In 1967 Soviet Foreign Policy 317 could as well have been Martian Astrology 317 so senseless it seemed to me. Much concerned me that year; transportation to my job 20 blocks off campus; eight credits of Russian, my girlfriend had missed her period. My classmates seemed scions of America’s aristocrats, financially secure, La vie san souci. Such unhappiness they suffered was like that neighborhood dog that would dig a hole, then bark in it for hours. So it seemed the anti-Vietnam war movement gave meaning to empty lives.
I now realize that Professor Petrovich, who had seen much, tread carefully when describing the Soviet Union, and never ever used the work ‘genocide’ in a Soviet context. Soviet Genocide? Come on! Where is your evidence? Robert Conquest? He’s anti-Communist. Though the Soviet Union was out of style in 1967, Red China was a ‘miracle of human equality’ as the ‘Cultural Revolution’ unleashed to cleanse ‘bureaucratism,’ with renewed revolutionary fervor.

I stood at the edge of some spring demonstration listening to a smarmy activist graduate student: “I am among the growing number of Americans who believe this government must be overthrown.” That worn and tired phrase of tired and worn Communist activists was new and shocking to me. I looked at him and visualized the German HitlerJugend Kristalnacht leader smashing the first Berlin window. Later during that 1967 spring, American Jugend would smash windows on State Street.

In 1967, the evidence was unclear. To me, the Soviets confiscated the farmer’s land and put them on collective farms. I loved beyond words the land upon which I grew up. I was anti-communist because the Communists confiscated farmland.

On the University of Wisconsin campus, the contending political issues were Maoism vs. Stalinism vs. Trotskyism. Other students, born in another solar system – Queens, New York or Winnetka, Illinois – made pilgrimages to Cuba and wore T-shirts with the image of the recently executed Che Chevarra.