ng precious mile after mile of the hostile
foothold. Now it spurted ahead as it had sometimes done before, at a
furious pace, to take over the coast as far north as the Russian River,
which now doubled the irony of its name, and added thousands of square
miles to its area at the enemy's expense. It surged directly westward
too, making what was left of the invader's foothold precarious in the
extreme.

The stockmarket boomed and the country went wild with joy at the news of
the Soviet defeats. At the darkest moment we had been delivered by
forces outside ourselves, but still indubitably American. Hymns of
praise were sung to the grass as the savior of the nation and in a burst
of gratitude it was declared a National Park, forever inviolate.
Rationing restrictions were eased and many industries were sensibly
returned to private ownership. Good old Uncle Sam was unbeatable
afterall.

But if the Americans were jubilant, the Russians were cast into deepest
gloom. Accustomed to tremendous wartime losses of manpower, they had at
first taken the news stoically, interpreting it as just another defeat
to be later redeemed by pouring fresh troops and then more fresh troops
after those which had gone down. But when they realized they had lost
not divisions but whole armies, that they had suffered a greater blow
than any in their history, that their reserve power was little greater
than the armies remaining to the Americans, and finally that the grass,
the foe which had dealt all these grievous blows, was rapidly wiping out
what remained of their bridgehead, they began to murmur against the war
itself.

"Under our dear little Uncle Stalin," they said, "this would never have
taken place. Our sons and brothers would not have been sent to die so
far away from Holy Mother Russia. Down with the enemies of Stalin. Down
with the warmongering bureaucracy."

The Kremlin hastened to assure the population it was carrying out the
wishes of the sainted Stalin. It convinced them of the purity of its
motives by machinegunning all demonstrators and executing after public
trials all Trotskyite-fascist-American saboteurs and traitors. For some
reason these arguments failed to win over the people and on November 7 a
new slogan was heard, "Long live Stalin and Trotsky," which proved so
popular that in a short time the entire bureaucracy was liquidated, the
Soviet Union declared an unequivocal workers' state, the army replaced
by Redguards, the sel