The author is correct. Honestly, during the entire Cold War every American university was pumping up the size of their Slavic Studies department - hiring profe

The author is correct. Honestly, during the entire Cold War every American university was pumping up the size of their Slavic Studies department - hiring professors left and right. While it certainly wasn't required, studying the Russian language, history, and literature was a fairly popular thing to do, and there certainly weren't any political problems with either teaching or studying it. Anything academic relating to Eastern Europe was funded very generously by the federal government, and with a background in Russian you could go on to get a respectable career in that same government. After the Cold War ended, the funding dried up, Russian stopped being such a desirable specialty for government work, and the tenured Slavic Studies professors who retired stopped being replaced. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - the size of the field was artificially inflated and now is returning to a somewhat more rational level.