husband of marjorie merriweather post heiress to the post breakfast cereal fortune whose take from those very lucrative moscow years now graces the walls of the hillwood museum outside washington, d.c. she got to buy up all the soviet artwork on the cheap in exchange, i suppose for her husband saying really nice things about stalin to roosevelt and to stalin himself, whom he said was a greater leaders and peter the great, catherine the great and all of them put together. you're greater even than lenin, he said. that was our ambassador to stalin during the great terror years. roosevelt also on the advice of, well, soviet agents, along with some their wealth, purged the state department of stalin phobes, and he actually even broke apart of the library of the eastern european division, where they had assembled all this material on the soviet union because people wanted to learn about what was actually happening there, getting soviet newspapers, journals gone to the winds, virtual book burning. so by the late 1930s to say there was soviet influence in washington would be a considerable under