Thus the crisis tended to emphasize again the importance of Russian history and the Russian language. In a sense this was justified. The force of events had made the Russian language predominant in Eastern Europe and the leaders of the USSR were almost exclusively Russian, except the Georgian Stalin, who regularly espoused the Great Russian cause for foreign consumption. All tendencies to stress the opponents of Moscow and their cultures ended abruptly with the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union and continued in the following period of Soviet-democratic cooperation. Such emphasis on the Russian character of the USSR was furthered by many of the Russian emigres, who at the height of the war, were only too ready, whatever their political convictions, to serve the cause of Mother Russia, a policy which was fostered by Stalin’s clever use of Russian slogans. Many British and American authorities zealously compared the German attack on the Soviets in 1941 to the German advance in 1918 after the Soviet Revolution. A bitter propaganda attack was started, both inside and outside the universities, against all national groups from the old Russian empire having separatist aspirations. The old equation that all who were not pro-Communist were pro-Nazi was repeated, especially after 1941. The Ukrainians received the worst criticism but they were not alone. Even though the United States government refused to recognize the seizure of the Baltic states, President Roosevelt acceded to the demands of Stalin and allowed him to sign the Atlantic Charter. They did not grant this to the representatives of the occupied countries, lest they break the friendship with that great anti-Nazi power—“Russia.” Under such conditions, lectures arranged by Professor Manning at Columbia University in the spring of 1941, with the aid of the Ukrainian National Association and a number of distinguished professors of Eastern Europe, evoked severe criticism from many anti-Nazi radio commentators who followed the whims of popular sentiment. The chief counterweight to this tendency was the arrival in the United States of many distinguished scholars who had escaped the holocaust of Nazi rule and the direct impact of Soviet power on Slavic scholarship. The circumstances of the peaceful occupation of Prague in the spring of 1939 made it difficult, if not impossible, for many Czech professors to leave. The chief exceptions were Professor Otokar Odlozilik and Professor Roman Jakobson who were outside the country when the storm struck.