I join the group: a great episode, really enjoyed. Especially the musical number at the end — oh, them good old days!
I wholeheartedly agree with the “go travel” advice. I didn’t have a chance to live abroad for a year in my high school days, I only got a month (in Sweden, really close georgaphically, but far enough culturally those days), and I envy you, but I dread the idea that I could not have gone abroad at all, like many of my peers; lack of the perspective and experience I received there would make me a much lesser person, that’s for sure.
Oh, and don’t expect many invocations of Stalinism in the same vein as you invoke the Third Reich from us Russians. In Russia, it is actually illegal (and punishable by jail time) to equate the Soviet Russia and the Nazi Germany. And if something you say can be taken as an insult to Our Grandfathers Who Fought The Great War (and saying things like “they fought for a questionable cause” or “they did horrible things in that war” is certainly viewed as the said insult in courts), it’s up to five years behind bars. Go figure.