In the period of tension which followed the Munich Agreement of 1938, the opening of World War II, and the period of Nazi-Soviet cooperation, Slavic studies in the United States, as well as the studies of the neighboring East European countries began to receive more serious consideration. A period of more active interest began. Because developments during World War II have continued since the ending of hostilities, it is difficult to draw a hard and fast line between the War and post-war period, largely because of the Cold War and the establishment of the Iron Curtain or, better yet, the recognition that there were tremendous gaps between the thinking of the Western free world and the Soviet dominated areas. On the surface, the reactions in 1939 differed little from those in 1914. This is well illustrated by the fact that at the annual opening exercises of Columbia University in 1939, President Nicholas Murray Butler repeated large extracts from his talk of 1914 on a similar occasion. Yet, the attention of the American public was more sharply focused on events in Eastern Europe than it had been in 1914 and the colleges and universities during the preceding twenty-five years had provided a larger nucleus of trained men. The events of the first months showed, however, that far too many of these trained men were still bound to the thinking of the past and were not prepared to take into account recent developments on a global, and even on an East European, scale. Such short-sightedness prevented adequate consideration of the situation as it unfolded day by day. The old myth that Russia was a single country inhabited by a single people, with boundaries defined long ago, proved remarkably vital. President Wilson’s formulation of a Russian policy in 1918, recognizing the need of the Russian people to choose their own form of government, was still accepted and even the colleges and universities paid little attention to the structure of the Soviet Union as it saw itself. The American people and their government continued to use the word Russian as a synonym for Soviet Union and were puzzled, as they had been in 1917, by the movements that arose in the territory. As in 1917, Finland stood out as a distinct nationality, but the popular reaction to the annexation of the Baltic republics was marked as much by confusion as by indignation. Supposed “experts” even found grim relief in the fact that after 1939 the borders of Germany and “Russia” were touching and this seemed to confirm the validity of the pre-1914 frontiers.