the Russians are coming

I forget why, I think it had something to do with something we were talking about at the Institute, but The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming was lingering in my queue for several ,months and it came to the top last week and I watched it Saturday night.

Not that hot, kind of a frenetic pace that reminded me of It's a Mad Mad Mad World though I haven't seen that movie since it first came out.  A Russian sub runs aground off the coast of Maine.  They are in a hurry to get off before the US armed forces find them, so they are trying to get a boat to pull them off the shoal, in the course of which they pull guns on some of the inhabitants and tie them up and wreck and steal some equipment, but they don't kill anybody and you can tell that they are not interested in that, they are a bunch of Russian teddy bears, nice guys just trying to get out of a jam.  Much madcap action ensues, there is a little romantic entanglement, and at the end the Russian sub is in the port with its guns trained on the townsfolk who are armed with rifles trained on the sub, and there is some kind of countdown.  Meanwhile a couple kids climb up a church steeple to get a better look at the action and one of the kids tumbles off the roof and is dangling from the eaves.  This catches everybody's attention and the townsfolk and the Russians work together to form a human ladder to save the kid.  But somebody alerts the air force and here come the jets preparing to blow up the sub, but the townsfolk give the ship an escort of their fishing boats so that the jets don't dare shoot at the sub and everybody lives happily ever after.

This was 1966 in the middle of the cold war.  Russia was our enemy in the quest for world dominion, bur as I recall, there wasn't a lot of animus toward the Russian people.  The theory was that the Russians were basically good people misled by an evil government.  I imagine there were similar sentiments among the Russians.  One thing I have to say is the fact that in all those years of the two of us armed with missiles and nuclear bombs facing each other down, it makes me feel good about both of us that neither nation actually fired any missiles.

I'm just wondering, Beagles was in Alaska about that time, and I wonder how Alaskans felt about Russkies, Alaska having once been part of Russia, and the two being so close to each other.  Did that make the Alaskans feel more favorable to Russian than the mainland, or less,

Liberals had warmer feelings for the Russians than conservatives at the time because you know we always want to get along and some of the anti Russkie propaganda seemed hysterical.  Then Russia collapsed and as they went through a series of leaders the thought was that eventually they would go democratic, but then we got Putin.  They still have elections, but the government controls most of the press and cracks down on dissidents. Still I think most Russians like Putin.  In the past we could believe that the Russian people were the victims of the evil commies, but now, knowing that they love their bare-chested Czar, they don't seem as lovable as before.