[ptaipale]

I don't see propaganda as much of a reason, it's simply that it looks sufficiently different.

But of course you are right that the alphabet is not so difficult in the end. Different people have different learning capabilities, but that "one afternoon" for the alphabet is not unreasonable. Correct pronunciation of the many variants of s (с, ж, з, ц, ч, ш, щ) will take much longer. I have never actually studied Russian, but can quite often understand newspaper headlines just by knowing the alphabet, and several Indo-European languages and Finnish, which has some common vocabulary.