What to Do When the Russians Come: A Survivor's Guide

4. AT HOME

WE THOUGHT IT best to begin with some advice in coping with the more immediate dangers. However, harder problems will in some ways eventually await those who have not been arrested, or whose arrest is still in the future.

Most people will find that they have to pick themselves up and somehow carry on with their lives. A few, mainly unattached young men, will be able to escape or join the partisan bands, but a family man or a working mother is likely to find that there is no alternative to simply staying put and getting on with their job or with whatever new job they may have been able to get. Fitting into the new order without encountering disaster is going to be a hazardous and wearing experience.

First of all, let us consider the problems that will face you, the ordinary citizen, in your everyday existence. What sort of scene might you expect to see around you as you strive to pick up the after the catastrophe?

Your situation will be squalid for a long time ahead. As conquerors, the Russians have never shown the slightest inclination to be magnanimous. They will squeeze America dry, and they won’t waste any time doing it. We would estimate that in five years, say, after the Occupation, the United States will be shabby, hungry, and cowed. Even that will be an improvement over what it was like immediately after the collapse.

In this connection, it might be instructive for you to acquaint yourself with what was happening in South Vietnam, particularly Saigon, when calamity overwhelmed it. Here was a pro-Western country struck down by a remorseless Soviet-sponsored Communist enemy. The final scenes of defeat might well resemble those that will occur in American cities in the first days. The reconstruction period, with its execution squads and reeducation camps, may bear a close similarity with American events, even allowing for the differences of place, time, and background.

• Many of the more prominent features of the new landscape you will inhabit are easy to predict:

• Apart from the purely military destruction, the economy will be thoroughly disrupted.

• Businesses producing anything except the barest necessities will, almost without exception, collapse.

• Oil will no longer be imported. Most domestic American oil will be earmarked for official purposes.

• Nationalization of all major firms will take place almost at [once.] Small firms will face the same fate within a year or two.

• Personal savings will be wiped out by the “currency reforms” that will reduce the value of the dollar to one-fiftieth or one-hundredth of the new Red dollar, which alone will be valid thereafter.

• American grain, which has already frequently prevented food [shortages] within the Soviet Union in past years (shortages brought about by the inefficiency of Soviet agriculture), will be abroad in great quantities. The Russians will take whatever other foodstuffs they want, and food shortages will result in United States—aggravated by the new agricultural system (see p. 68).

• Large amounts of engineering equipment will be removed to the USSR, often with American technicians attached, as “war reparations” or under some other quasi-legal excuse or will be “purchased” at prices dictated by the Soviets. This would follow the pattern of the dismantling and removal of equipment from Germany and Manchuria in 1945.

One of the first results of Soviet-style “planning” will be an immense expansion of economic bureaucrats and administrators, leading to a corresponding fall off in efficiency. Even the derisory amounts of raw materials that your firm or factory may have been allocated will have been wrongly forecast, and they will never arrive when they are supposed to. Wherever you work, you will encounter severe dislocations and will live in an atmosphere of increasing pressure, corner cutting, faking of results, and so on. The general effects of this on the attitude and morale of you and your fellow workers will be vicious.

Yet there will be a period of brief leeway of which you should take every possible advantage. There will be weeks, even months, during which the occupation forces will be settling down and establishing themselves. The first days will naturally be highly perilous from the point of view of rape, murder, random shootings, and summary executions; but the local commandants will have too many other pressing problems to take over all the stores and smaller businesses immediately. Of course, there will be certain concerns that will peter out at once, such as real estate, others will struggle on with a diminishing stock of goods. The stores alone will be encouraged to keep up their supplies to level and will even be encouraged to replenish their shelves from their contacts in the countryside.

All stores will fall under occupation management as soon as [things] are more or less stabilized. Minor businesses will be supervised [by] official controllers and will require the use of permits for all obtained or sold. Only later will they be formally nationalized and put beneath the umbrella of a new Department of Internal Trade.

Such a vista of businesses that have been wrecked or shut down, or that are functioning only at a fraction of capacity, will [be] somber enough for managers and employees; but it will bear even more heavily on you in your capacity as consumer. So let us [look] at some aspects of the Occupation as they affect you in this most and practical guise.

It is not only privation as such that you will suffer.

Many countries in times of crisis or war have seen their citizens willingly abandon higher standards of living for the national cause. The weekly meat ration in Britain in the 1940s was about the size of a man’s thumb and forefinger. American citizens, although not to such a degree, also accepted rationing and shortages and would have been willing to accept far worse if the circumstances had required it.

This time, it will not only be the case that the privations are the result of national humiliation; that much of what you fail to receive, even in basic foodstuffs, will be exported; that an alien-affiliated ruling elite will have far larger rations. What will stick in your throat even more is having every privation you or your family suffer inflicted on you by the decree of those you hate and despise and not even being permitted to grumble about it.

To begin with, the circumstances of the Russian takeover will lead to rigorous rationing. This will continue even after basic foodstuffs cease to be in short supply. Your family will spend a large portion of their time and energies in going around the stores, trying to discover where food and clothing and other necessities are available.

At present, about a third to a half of American women have jobs, but under the Occupation, the number of American women who work will rise until virtually all of them are employed except the very old or the very young—and even a good many of these. Otherwise it will simply not be possible for their families to reach even the minimal prevailing standards of life. Even so, the family food intake will decrease dramatically.

Life, as we have said, will be exceptionally burdensome for many women whose husbands have been arrested. They will often follow them into the camps, their children being taken by the State or boarded out with relatives who are willing and able to have them, as indicated in the last chapter. In the meantime, however, such women will lose their jobs, although they may be able to scrape along by obtaining menial and part-time employment as street cleaners or manual laborers on building sites. Many will beg or scavenge, activities that will be prohibited by the State but that will be so widespread that they will have to be winked at. An additional trial for a woman in this position is that her relatives and friends, to save their own skins, will be forced to shun her and cease to maintain a relationship with her.

But even the ordinary housewife, out shopping, will concentrate on locating supplies of bread and potatoes, which will be the main staples. Meat may be obtained for about one meal a week, if then. Stores will close when their supplies run out and will be virtually mobbed when their doors open. Lines, in which the mood will tend toward a bad temper, will be obligatory not just inside the stores but will commonly stretch along the sidewalk outside and around the corner of the block. Busy mothers will be able to hire the services of elderly people who can earn a few pennies by making a profession of standing or sitting in line as substitutes until the shopper who pays them can get there. Both wives and husbands would also be well-advised to always carry with them a string bag in case they hear of some necessary foodstuff or useful commodity becoming unexpectedly available.

You will not be choosy in the way you shop, and you will take everything on offer. There will not be much of a selection, particularly after present stocks are gone. Normally only one type of soap, stockings, razor and so on will be available. What selection there is will often tend to have an eccentric character. One month the stores will be overflowing with pickled gherkins from Poland or stuffed peppers from East Germany or whatever else the Soviet Union and its partners are dumping on you. Whether or not you and your family are partial to gherkins and peppers, buy them. You may find an imaginative way to serve them up or sell or exchange them with people who like them. It is always a mistake in any Communist country to turn up your nose at any food that happens to be going. The rule is: stock up. And if by any chance you lay your hands on something extra good, keep it for a birthday, an anniversary, a special occasion. It will give you something to look forward to, something memorable to interrupt the wearisome procession of the days.

Above all, make sure you keep your family as well provided as possible with warm clothing. A constant feature of your daily life will be the breakdown of power supplies and other public services. Even when they are restored, fuel shortages and the deterioration of equipment, together with administrative inefficiency, will result in chronic cuts in electricity, gas, and oil, with a ban on all but “essential” uses in the home and elsewhere. Your first winters are liable to be particularly miserable. Central heating, like air-conditioning, will be a thing of the past, except in the districts commandeered by the elite. You would do well to invest in a Swedish-type wood-burning stove and get used to cooking on a Primus stove or some other cooker that works on solid fuel. If you live in the city, it will help you greatly if you have friends or relatives in the country who can help secure you odd items of food. This will depend, of course, on whether the farmers themselves have been left by their overseers with any surplus, or have been clever enough to conceal it. Country friends may also help with good firewood. (In the cities in wintertime, you will notice that the benches, bushes, branches of trees, and even whole trees will mysteriously vanish from the public parks.)

If you live in the suburbs, your lawns and flowerbeds will largely relapse into a natural state since you won’t have the time, energy, or gasoline to mow and to tend them, although you may keep a few strips shorn with a hand mower or shears. If you are very lucky, and so situated, it might be possible to use the grass more profitably by keeping chickens and, perhaps, a pig—if you can spare the scraps from your kitchen for nonhuman consumption and can get permission for such activity, as may be the case if you are prepared to let the official concerned have a share of the by-product. All such livestock will even then have to be guarded continuously from sneak thieves and bands of marauders, and this will almost certainly prove very difficult to do. You should consider the risks. For example, it may be possible to keep the pig indoors at night and well watched by day; and neighbors in the same position may collaborate.

You may also be able to grow a few vegetables, although these too will need protection. Fruit trees, if you had them, are likely to have been cut down. But berry bushes of various types may survive and be an invaluable source of vitamins.

You will no longer have a deep freeze and seldom even a refrigerator in working order, but you can bottle or dry out your fruits and vegetables and add them to your store cupboard.

When it comes to purchases, do not rely on food that needs refrigerating since, even if your refrigerator works, the electricity supply will be unreliable, at any rate for some time. Tins and dried foods will be best, as well as being more easily hidden or disguised, and take up less space. But you might explore the possibility of getting hold of one of the old-fashioned iceboxes, which could in the end prove more serviceable and durable than the modern kind.

Speaking of bottles, alcohol will be a tremendous temptation, as it is in all Communist countries. Since, as in all those countries, there will be little in the way of recreation, we do not take it upon ourselves to point out the obvious dangers of lapsing into apathetic soddenness. But be careful how you make home brew—both from the point of view of your health and because it will be illegal and, though usually winked at, be the subject of occasional crackdowns and exemplary sentences to forced labor.

To resume, there are all manner of household items like soap and toothpaste, needle and thread, razor blades, patching materials, flashlight bulbs and batteries, light bulbs and candles, and other odds and ends that seem trivial in time of prosperity but loom large in time of adversity. Sugar, salt, flour, matches, tea, and coffee are other staples that come to mind under this heading, and powdered milk and powdered soups might one day prove especially valuable. These things, if you lay in a stock in time, will help to see you through to when conditions are becoming comparatively better. But the most important items by far will be your reserve of medicines and vitamins. Stock up on these while they are still available and do not stint on them. At a time when sickness and malnutrition will be rife, a couple of aspirin, a cup of beef bouillon, or a spoonful of health-food supplement may save a life. You might also consider getting a quantity of water-purifying tablets.

Tea, coffee, and cigarettes are at a particular premium in the sort of gloomy breakdown that the initial phase of the Occupation will produce. Tea will be of especial value in helping you to carry on, as will coffee, although the demand for the latter will quickly lead to a breakdown in supply, and you may not find palatable the substitutes that will come on the market such as ersatz coffee made from acorns.

As for cigarettes, in postwar Europe and Asia they served as the main consolation and stimulant. We do not urge you to take up smoking again (one of us is a nonsmoker), but if you do, the risks will be negligible compared with the others facing you. If you do give in to it, you may find the sense of revivification worth it, since unlike other drugs, even alcohol, it will not blunt the edge of your vigilance. Moreover, it will not be discouraged by the Soviets, and your only real problem will be to obtain tolerable brands. The bulk of American-made cigarettes will be confiscated for use by the Soviet troops and other official bodies, and American tobacco is of such high repute in the USSR that most of the remainder will be exported, at the usual unfavorable trade terms, to Russia and other favored Communist countries. Still, there is such a large amount of tobacco in the United States that it may become, as it did in postwar Europe, a veritable unofficial currency, with a definite exchange value when the dollar itself is collapsing. We would therefore advise you, whether a smoker or not, to gather together a supply and put it to good use during the initial transition period.

With regard to hoarding valuables of other kinds, we would suggest that you forget all about money. Dollars will soon be worthless or nearly so. Gold will retain its value, but hoarding of it implies the risk of confiscation and of the labor camp. Nevertheless, as a reserve, and particularly in the case of an attempt to escape to Australia or any other better clime that may still exist, we suggest that a very small, and easily concealed, amount of gold plus a few gemstones of good quality might prove real lifesavers. Gems of great value can look very ordinary and be almost unnoticeable. A mere ounce or two might make all the difference during the process of flight, as has been a common experience in Eastern Europe.

You will also want to have a reserve of more solid property, of a kind not subject to automatic confiscation, that you can sell off from time to time, piece by piece, to help tide you through bad times and to stave off starvation.

These, if you cannot sell or barter privately, you will be able to take to a chain of State-run shops, which will buy the valuables of the ruined “privileged classes” at rates that are a fraction of their real value but that you will have to accept. Here you can dispose of jewelry, silver, pictures, and ornaments.

As for the rest of your possessions, there usually comes a time in any Soviet occupation, usually in the early stages, when most people who own valuable furniture have to sell it off for food or fuel. You should look over your household effects in good time with a view to such an eventuality. Acquire a few more chairs than you need. Choose them in a style that will appeal to the taste of the new rich class of Communist bureaucrats: ornate, pretentious, with some claim to being heirlooms handed down from members of the French aristocracy (or whatever story seems plausible). The proceeds of such a sale may keep you going for weeks or months and may also give you a useful connection with members of the new elite.

All this sounds as if you might need a good deal of space for storage. Above all, be careful to tuck your supplies out of sight not only to save room but to hide them from nosy neighbors who might come poking into your kitchen. They could be the sort of people who, if you quarrel with them (or even if you don’t), might denounce you for hoarding. When real shortages develop, anything that might be even mildly stigmatized as “hoarding” will be punishable. Your stores will in any case be liable to confiscation—not automatically, but if local or national authority so decides. We advise you, therefore, to be circumspect in your purchases, not to talk too much about them, and not to look as if you are overdoing your purchasing.

In spite of this need for some caution toward your fellow citizen, we have already implied that you should share your home with other members of your family or invite friends or neighbors to move in. There will be enough of them around whose houses have been confiscated or destroyed. If you don’t, the local Communist housing officer, even if he does not confiscate your house, is certain to take over the greater part of it to billet people who will be total strangers and some of whom will be of dubious trustworthiness. Living with people you like, you will be able to share your troubles, bringing up children, doing the shopping, standing in line, and all the day-to-day activities of a problem-packed life. Equally important, you and your new companions may find that one establishment is easier and less costly to run, if you put your minds to it, than two or more, especially in the new circumstances.

The essence of the matter, of course, is compatibility. The fact that people get on each others’ nerves at close quarters is nowhere more dramatically illustrated than in the rabbit warrens of Moscow and Leningrad, where a whole underground literature testifies to the neurotic hatreds that flourish. And yet, oddly enough, it is also a fact that people who are capable of behaving toward each other in this churlish fashion will often be found banding together in a crisis and in the face of the State and are capable of touching acts of humble heroism, self-sacrifice, and mutual help. Nevertheless, though especially if you have to receive state-sponsored billeteers, we would advise you to learn a lesson from the apartment dwellers of the Soviet Union and keep everything padlocked, even your pots and pans, and almost literally nail down anything that could possibly be filched.

Needless to say, the household ought also to take pains to stockpile beforehand anything they might need later in the form of tools, nails and screws, shingles, tar for patching holes in the roof, and so on. All these items will become virtually unobtainable after the war when present stocks are exhausted, as they will be very low on the list of objects that the occupation authorities will ordain for manufacture.

A good set of ladders (padlocked) will be useful as well as several sheets of glass. It is demoralizing to have to live in a house whose windows are broken or boarded up with plywood or cardboard, and being able to mend your smashed windows will give you a small psychological lift. On the other hand, it will not be advisable to paint the exterior of your house or lavish too much care and attention on it. See that it is sound-and-water-proof, but otherwise foster a discreet shabbiness. You won’t want your house to stand out. Begin to cultivate early the art of keeping a low profile.

There will be work enough inside the house to keep you going. You will have endless trouble with your plumbing. In general, we would strongly urge both men and women to become do-it-yourself experts. Develop, as far as possible, any skills you may have in the fields of maintenance and repair. This will not only be useful at home but marketable in the world outside. It could provide you with a small steady income and serve as one of the other jobs that you will have to do if you are to make ends meet. Except for the elite, plumbers, carpenters, and electricians will be hard to come by. (Such skills may also save your life if you land in a labor camp.) Try to obtain a sewing machine—hand or foot, not electrically, operated. You will then be equipped, at some time in the future, to earn extra money for the family as a seamstress, dressmaker, or even an upholsterer.

There are many automobiles in America. Few will be left in “private” hands, except for those allocated to the Party and the Russians. Most will be pulled into car pools run by the offices and enterprises; here too, the more privileged people will have first choice. (There will be a limited number of jobs as drivers in both these categories, and you may be able to get one. However, in spite of advantages such as occasional tips or food from the Party bosses, you may prefer not to have your life disrupted by irregular hours, to say nothing of the risk of failing to keep the car in good repair for want of spare parts and facing a charge of sabotage.) But in any case, the shortage of gasoline will drive the majority of cars off the road, and unless you can get a special ration, as may be possible for distant farmers, you are unlikely to be able to use your own car, even if you can keep it.

Mobile caravans will be confiscated, unless you must live in yours yourself if your home is appropriated or destroyed. Yachts and powerboats will be compulsorily laid up or put out of action. If you possess a seagoing vessel you might, of course, think about using it while you can, during or immediately after the cessation of hostilities, to try to make a run for freedom. Such a course of action obviously requires a good deal of reflection and planning.

The preferred, indeed almost the only, mode of private transport will be the bicycle. You might like to be prepared by buying yourself and the other members of your family good sturdy no-nonsense vehicles while the supply is still plentiful and while you can lay in a stock of tires and accessories. Don’t buy bicycles that are too flimsy and too flashy and that are likely to attract disapproving or dishonest eyes. Paint the chrome gray or black or otherwise dull it over. Get a strong padlock. You may find that you have to bicycle a long way to your place of work and back, with perhaps a good many hills and obstacles besides; but except in bad weather, you might find that this acts as something of a tonic since it will enable you to work off the side effects of your often starchy diet while providing you with moderate exercise at the same time.

After some weeks, a public transport system in the form of buses, and eventually subways, will be reestablished, at least in a skeletal form. The railways will survive, probably burning coal since coal is plentiful in the United States and the mines (strikes being forbidden) will be one of the few industries working to full capacity. And it may be that you will become accustomed to seeing on the streets of America those weird and ingenious contraptions that circulated in Europe in World War II.