What to Do When the Russians Come

AFTERWORD

If you have followed us thus far, you are no doubt shocked and gloomy. What can we say to cheer you up? Our advice on how to behave under Soviet rule will generally improve your chances of survival. But even if you survive, the prospects are grim enough, for the scenes we have described are not imaginary. They have happened elsewhere. They will happen in the United States if its leaders misunderstand Soviet motives, or if they make miscalculations in their foreign policy.

We live in dangerous times. Such miscalculations are very possible. But they are not inevitable.

The American people and their representatives have it in their power to prevent their country from undergoing the ordeal we have described. A democratic government, with all its distractions and disadvantages, is still the most effective method that men and women have yet devised for deciding policy. It is not infallible, it is slow to learn, and it is willing to grasp at comfortable illusions; but it may yet act decisively. If it does not, its ideals may yet prove ineradicable. We would guess that even in the depths of defeat, invasion, and occupation, the memory of what democracy has meant to Americans will not perish. Men and women will remember that their parents and grandparents once lived in hope and freedom and will determine to wrest the same for their own children and grandchildren. The recollection of that lost democracy will sharpen the longing for it. It is when Americans have been most cruelly and thoroughly collectivized that they will yearn most fiercely to regain their individuality. The more the Soviet absolutists and their allies suppress the individual, the more they will nourish him.

But why should we fear that such an ordeal may face us? The economic potential of the West in gross national product is far greater than that of the Soviet Union. In a direct comparison between the United States and the USSR, the Soviet GNP (in 1981)—and for a larger population—was about 1,500 billion dollars as against the American 3,000 billion dollars. The GNP of the NATO countries (and France) was about 5,700 billion dollars against the Warsaw Pact’s 1,800 billion dollars. And that is to say nothing of the other allies and friends of the West: Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Brazil alone add another 1,400 billion dollars, while the contribution of Russia’s allies outside the Warsaw Pact is negligible. Even the population of the NATO countries is greater, with 554.8 million against the Warsaw Pact’s 365.7 million. And, with all the deficiencies of the Western effort, military manpower is not much less than that of the Warsaw Pact: 4.8 million as against 5.2 million.

In fact, the Soviet Union is economically far behind the United States. American technology is always a generation ahead of theirs. They have to turn to the United States for wheat. The Soviet economy is at a dead end. The Communist system has failed to win support in any of the countries of Eastern Europe. The Soviet idea has no attractions. On any calculation—of economic power or social advance or intellectual progress there could be no question of the Russians imposing their will. But in terms of actual military power, the West’s advantage does not seem to have been made use of. It is at least matched, and many would say overmatched, in the nuclear field; the Western forces in Europe have less than half the striking power of their opponents. It is no good our being more advanced than they are if this is not translated into power—both military power and political willpower. As a leading British student of Soviet matters, Professor Hugh Seton-Watson, has said, the fact that a man is a more advanced creature than a crocodile will not be of much use to him if he goes swimming naked in the Nile.

How can they be a threat—a threat to the mere existence of the United States?

Because they have made an armament effort wholly disproportionate to their economic capacity. Because they have developed techniques of expansion through puppets. Because they have maintained a single-minded, long-term intention to press forward. Because the West misunderstands this.

Yet democracy has been underrated before. Its ideals—the urge to be free, to live one’s life in one’s own way without the bullying interference of the State—are built into the human psyche, especially in America. It may yet wake to the problem.

Just as the airlines hope that their passengers will never have to follow the instructions they give you on what to do in case of a disaster, so we, for our part, hope you may never have to follow the advice we have given you in the preceding pages. But time is running short. We would be deceiving you if we pretended that the nightmare we have described is not a real and deadly possibility. If it does come about, we have one last piece of advice: