Free High Jinx by William F. Buckley

as they were with the ways of Moscow. Alice Goodyear Corbett knew all about their holidays and their history, their museums and their toys. She went regularly to play with other girls, daughters of other Americans and of English and German journalists, but she found, after reaching her teens, that her relations with them tended to be more mechanical than those with her Russian friends. Given her choice, she elected to accept invitations to spend time with her Russian friends.
    But then, approaching college age in the late twenties, she discovered, after one incident in particular, that as a foreigner she was generically suspect. She had been excitedly invited to a birthday party by her oldest friend, Olga. The day before the party and after Alice Goodyear Corbett had saved two weeks’ allowance to buy a special birthday present, a Mickey Mouse watch, Olga said that her parents had called off the party. Alice Goodyear Corbett stared hard at Olga, who turned her head to one side and began to cry. She confessed that her parents had become afraid of foreigners coming to their home, Comrade Stalin having pronounced recently on the dangers of cosmopolitanism. Alice Goodyear Corbett had replied that she was not Jewish, so at least that particular charge could not apply to her, but Olga was simply confused, and cried some more. There were other such incidents.
    Alice Goodyear Corbett reacted by resolving in word and deed clearly to dispel any suspicion on the part of anyone who observed her that by virtue of her parents’ background she was hostile to what was becoming the country of her choice. She began to pay special attention during the long indoctrination courses, and consistently got the highest grades in the class, mastering the minutiae of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. In time she was being called upon to give demonstration answers to questions put to her in front of the whole class before visiting teachers from other parts of first Moscow, then other Russian cities. By the time she had graduated from secondary school she had achieved a minor eminence in the student world of Moscow: the perfectly trained Soviet protégée. Some indication of this reached her father (her mother had never managed to learn a word of Russian and simply ignored her daughter’s activities except as they involved domestic arrangements). Her father passed it off as the kind of thing precocious children tended to do—involve themselves in their own culture—and paid little attention to it. Besides, he was himself sympathetic with what the Soviet state was trying to do and not entirely decided whether, when time came to retire, he would go back to Virginia. Perhaps he might just stay on in Moscow.
    While a second-year student at the University of Moscow, Alice Goodyear Corbett had been called surreptitiously to the inner sanctum of the Party, located in the Student Union Building, and proudly informed that close observation by her teachers and others had persuaded officials to pay her the supreme honour of extending to her an invitation to join the Communist Party which, if she accepted, would mean that she shared an honour with only three per cent of the Soviet population. The principal condition attached to her membership was that on no account was she to divulge this development to anyone, especially not to her father or to her mother, because although they were known to be friendly to the great revolution, if it became known that their only child had become a member of the Party this would embarrass him with his employer, the United Press, perhaps even bringing about his recall to the United States and depriving the Soviet Union of a useful commentator.
    Alice accepted the honour with great enthusiasm. During her two trips home to Virginia during the preceding five years she had become practiced in defending Soviet policies. Much of what was alleged about Stalin’s Russia was, quite simply, a lie—for instance the charge