What to Do When the Russians Come

We have given you something of the general picture of what your life, as an American, will be like under Soviet rule—and we shall be giving you more in later chapters. But you will also be anxious to know how someone of your own particular professional and ethnic and political and tempermental background is likely to fare. In the pages that follow, we look into the special conditions facing a wide variety of these, of a reasonably representative nature, from Academic to Farmer, from Realtor to Industrial Worker, from Black to Student, from Homosexual to Feminist, from Soldier to Traitor.

Academic

When universities reopen after the crisis, student numbers will have gone down. Some will be dead, some in prison, some in the partisan movement.

Private, religious, and racially or ethnically oriented institutions will have been taken over by the State. All departments, but especially those of history, philosophy, political science, economics, and sociology, will be purged of “incorrect” teachers with great thoroughness. The curricula will be thinned down and streamlined along Russian lines, with the more controversial and enterprising elective courses omitted.

Colleges will be run by Communist-appointed functionaries, including representatives of the secret police, and there will be no “academic freedom.” If you are at the moment an academic with Communist or Marxist leanings, you can expect to become at least a dean or the head of your department, at least for as long as your orthodoxy is regarded as adequate. If you lack such credentials, you must make up your mind to tread warily and keep your mouth shut. Eschew the banter, gossip, and small talk that is normally the small change of academic life. Departmental infighting will cease to be a diversion and will become a blood-sport, the losers being consigned to the ranks of bricklayers, coal miners, and washroom attendants, if lucky. Sneaking and denunciation will be the order of the day, and since the arrest rate will be one of the highest in any field, you will be hard put to trust your colleagues, for you will not be able to tell which of them have become police informers, either of their own volition or through blackmail.

Similarly, take care not to make unguarded remarks to your students since one or more of the students in each of your classes will be stool pigeons or undercover “observers,” or starry-eyed members of the Party. Be generous with your grades since disgruntled students will denounce you, and if convenient, their complaints will be produced as hard evidence of your unreliability.

On the other hand, some professors may be relieved to find that the student body will otherwise become hardworking, respectful, and serious to the point of being subdued (see Student below). Campus protests will be a thing of the past.

You will find giving and attending Marxism-Leninism classes boring, but if you can manage to appear enthusiastic you will be rewarded accordingly. The hardest thing to which you will have to accustom yourself will be the distortion of your researches and of scholarship in general. Many of the books that you will need to consult will have been removed from the shelves of the library; and your own articles, theses, and books will be subject to State censorship. Publishing outlets will in any case be few and themselves under State control (see Publisher). You will find it necessary to import Marxist-Leninist jargon into the most unlikely topics, and it will take you some years to acquire the ability that academics in the older Communist countries have developed of discounting the obligatory Party-line nonsense and reading between the lines. At first, the necessity of accepting and expressing ideas that are mendacious, silly, or downright crackpot will depress you; in time you may get used to it. (See also Schoolteacher; Scientist.)

Accountant

If deemed suitable, you will be incorporated into the burgeoning government apparatus at a flat salary.

Actor

Theatrical enterprises and the entertainment industry will come under the control of government administrators and will be severely curtailed. Productions of plays and films will be cut back and their predominant style will be stereotyped and will adhere to the dogma of “socialist realism” (see Artist; Writer). Censorship will be strict, and comedy and “satire” will be bland to the point of toothlessness. The repertoire will be meager and restricted to safe and unexceptionable material. Theatrical people, even more than academics (see above), are given to indiscretion, love gossip, and say what they feel like saying at the moment when they feel like saying it. Break yourself of this habit. Keep your grievances and your witticisms to yourself. This will not be easy since you will see the plum roles going to mediocre performers who happen to be members of the Party or who stand well with it. But you must persevere.

Advertising Agency Owner or Employee

This class of work will be terminated.

Aircraft Manufacturer or Worker

Aircraft factories will be nationalized, drastically reduced in scale, and subject to exceptionally stringent security controls. Key technicians may be dispatched to the USSR. (See also Scientist; Industrial Worker).

Air Force (see Military)

Alcoholic

Officially, drinking will be discouraged, but the State will need its large income from taxes on liquor, so alcohol will be easy enough to obtain. Quality, as in the case of most other consumer goods, will be sacrificed to quantity, and those better brands that survive will be available only at great cost and to privileged purchasers. Home brews will be much cheaper and more potable than most State products, so there will be a great proliferation in illicit distilling. Heavy drinking and drunkenness will sharply increase. Partly, as in the Soviet Union and other Communist countries, this will be the result of the general unpleasantness of life; partly it will be because of the dearth of other forms of entertainment.

Although drunkenness will be more or less tolerated, since drinkers seldom become politically troublesome, alcoholism leading to persistent lateness or trouble on the job or to rowdy behavior in public will not. For the drunks who are found littering the streets, there will be the kind of rugged drying-up centers and sobering-up tanks that exist at the present time in Soviet cities, where the offender is dehydrated, deloused, made to go “cold turkey,” and not released until detoxicated.

Anarchist

You will be shot or sent to a labor camp quicker than most.

Antique Dealer

Your premises will be looted more efficiently and less crudely than most by men sent by senior Russian officers to skim off the cream of your stock. If you work in a small way and maintain your shop in a shabby and unobtrusive condition, you may be allowed to continue on a reduced scale, as you can serve as a point where Americans can bring their remaining small treasures that you will then resell on commission to the occupiers.

Architect

No new buildings will be erected for some time. You may obtain work on rebuilding and repairs. Eventually, buildings will be constructed according to Soviet principle. Take care to avoid all styles that are original, “modern,” and imaginative and stick to the concrete-box type of architecture. You will be a government employee, on a fixed salary, with occasional bonuses for acceptable service.

Army (see Military)

Artist

Styles differing in any marked degree from “socialist realism” will not receive permission to be exhibited. Socialist Realism is a form of Victorian academic painting and sculpture used to point up morals acceptable to and glorifying the State and the Communist leadership. The style was instituted by Stalin in 1934 when he officially decreed that art must be “the truthful depiction of reality in its revolutionary development.” By “truthful.” Stalin meant Communist in content and photographic in form. For half a century Soviet art has been frozen in this vulgar and stodgy posture. After the Occupation, American artists will also be required to adhere to the tradition of Soviet art and will find it safer and more profitable to abandon all thought of being adventurous and experimental.

On the other hand, employment will be readily available in the mass production of propaganda posters, crude cartoons, and the illustration of Party literature. There will be a continuous demand for portraits, statues, and murals depicting those political figures who are in good odor, although if you are commissioned to execute such set pieces of the Communist leadership, you should, if possible, design them in such a way that the figures of those members of the original cast who have fallen into disfavor can easily be erased at a later date.

General instructions as to style and content will be issued regularly by the science and culture department of the Central Committee of the Communist party, so there will be no actual need for an artist to worry about giving offense as long as he follows the simple official pronouncements. However, artists ambitious for more than average success and remuneration will be well-advised to keep abreast of political developments. Still, caution is needed, and it is not advisable to attach yourself too closely to any single patron, who might suddenly disappear in a reshuffle.

If you receive your diploma after four years at an official art school, you will be registered as a member of the Union of Artists. With your diploma, you will be ipso facto “an artist.” Without it, you will not be able to join the union and so will never be eligible to exhibit in any museum or gallery or in any of the officially sponsored art exhibits; as an artist, you will be a lifelong “nonperson.” If you wish, you can work on your own, without much fear of actual arrest, at least for this reason, although you can only put up your pictures on the walls of your own apartment, where people will be cautious about coming to see them and more cautious still about expressing an opinion about them.

If you are fortunate enough to become a member of the union, we would advise you, unless you are a born intriguer, not to become too deeply involved with its caucuses and committees. Artists who emerge on the wrong side are liable to denunciation and expulsion, with the consequent end of their careers.

Athlete

At first there will be a great decline in the number of teams since resources will be lacking. The whole sphere of sports will be brought under Party control. Then, selected teams will be fostered in all the main games. Thus, the professional athlete temporarily out of a job in his speciality and confident of his skill should stay in training as long as he can in the hope of returning.

Professionalism will be unknown in theory, but in practice athletes will be given office and other jobs at which they will not be required to work, so that they will be professional in fact if not in name. But the teams will be sponsored by the bodies supposedly employing them—that is, by various bureaucratic and party institutions. The secret police has always been prominent among these in Communist countries, and some athletes may not wish to work, even in this indirect way, for such a body— even apart from the fact that the police team is naturally always the most unpopular with the fans. On the other hand, if you are good, transfer to a secret police team may be hard to avoid.

Once accepted for a team or for track events, the athlete will do comparatively well as far as rations and perquisites are concerned; but he will have no rights with his employers. And, however popular, he is liable to be made an example of to deter others. Thus, the three Starostin brothers, soccer stars under Stalin, were sent to labor camps. And in Czechoslovakia, the great national athlete Zatopek was stripped of all his positions and given menial work when he supported popular resistance to the USSR.

Games played against “fraternal” teams from Moscow will sometimes be the occasion of “anti-Soviet demonstrations” by American fans; and the players will not escape blame.

All the same, the dangers of the profession are comparatively small, and you will have the satisfaction of being able to give your fellow citizens harmless pleasure at a time when there will be little of that around.

Automobile Dealer

Out of business.

Banker or Bank Employee

Banks will be among the first businesses to be nationalized. Services will be cut to the barest minimum—indeed, even checking accounts are regarded with suspicion by the Soviets. Savings will be limited to State bonds, although there will be little spare money to save. Credit cards will be abolished. (See also Businessperson.)

Barber

Barber shops will be countenanced, although any but the most orthodox haircuts will be heavily discouraged. You may not be nationalized for several years but will then become standardized and paid as a public servant, under a new Department of Internal Trade, as in other Communist countries.

Beautician

Most beauty salons will close for lack of patrons with enough money to be able to afford such luxuries. A few will remain open at the center of big cities to serve the new Communist elite and the wives of Soviet generals and senior officers.

Black

It has always been a Communist aim to penetrate and control black movements in the United States, with a view, first of all, to using them against the American system, and second, to persuading them that only under communism can the black get justice. The Russians will turn their attention to the blacks, as to the other minorities, as a major article of policy. Black Communists will at first enjoy a disproportionate chance of being given a high position. On the other hand, the importance attached by the Russians to building up black participation and cooperation in the political sphere is going to result in particularly strict purges of those black leaders and organizations that stand in the way of such plans. Those that emphasize the idea of a black culture different from the official one and unassimilable to it, such as the Black Muslims, will be crushed at once. Others will simply be placed under black Communist leaders; and these in turn will suffer the usual cycle of purges. Such groups as compete for the souls of the black population, like the Southern Baptists, will be taken over, or disrupted, with special ruthlessness as the Soviets seek to capture the black constituency.

For the unpolitical majority of blacks, the Occupation is bound to bring about a sudden turn for the worse. While equality of the races as well as of the sexes (see Feminist below) will have been proclaimed, there will be a cessation of all quotas in jobs and education and a cancellation of all “equal opportunity” and “affirmative action” programs. There will no longer be a problem of black unemployment—in the sense that people who are unemployed cannot expect to have their problems more or less sympathetically examined at their labor exchanges, but instead will be summarily directed into any kind of job or into the regular labor corps or labor battalions.

The American Communists at one time envisaged a black Soviet republic in the old “Black Belt” in the South; but this was abandoned long ago in favor of an integrationist attitude, and it now seems unlikely, although perhaps not quite impossible, that it will be revived. More probably areas with a high proportion of black population will have black mayors, and the first secretary of the local Communist party will also be black. But it is a principle of the Soviet order that the interests of the Party come first, and that key power positions must be filled according to this principle regardless of racial or other considerations. The Soviet method is to give all powers of controlling personnel to the second secretary, who, in minority areas in the Soviet Union, is almost invariably a white man appointed directly from the Central party apparatus. You will often find, in fact, that a rather shadowy figure from out of state, often white, will be the repository of real power in your neighborhood. It will be an offense for black party members to raise the issue and will result in their removal.

It will be declared that complete equality now reigns and much publicity will be given to figures proving that this is so. No independent bodies will exist to investigate or question these figures or to draw attention to spheres which have been mysteriously left unrecorded. If you do discover imbalances, you will not be in a position to launch a campaign about them unless it is a very short one cut off abruptly by arrest.

Thus in the earlier phase, the Soviets will need to strengthen their position as best they can, and in the face of sullen distaste for the new order, they will seek to use the minorities. In the long run, however, and as they entrench themselves, they will begin to place emphasis on the majority.

The Russian record with their own minorities is, indeed, very bad. In theory all nations are equal, but in practice control by Russians, the Russification of schools, and the repression of all nationalist elements is continual. In Stalin’s time eight small nations, totaling about a million and a half people, were deported—every man, woman, and child—from their homelands to Siberia and central Asia, where around a third of them died. To this day, although the charges against them have been dropped, three of these nations, numbering about half a million, are still in exile.

Bookstore Owner or Employee

Bookstores will be State-run and will only stock State-printed literature. Employment may possibly be obtained in one of the State stores, though your previous exposure to non-Communist books will render you suspect. (See also Librarian; Publisher.)

Building Contractor

You will be regarded as a virtually unreconstructible member of the bourgeoisie, and your chances of remaining at liberty are low. In any case your firm will at once be incorporated in the new Department of Construction and your workers will become low-grade state employees. (See also Contractor.)

Businessperson

Big-time businesspeople, and particularly such paladins of capitalism as bankers and stockbrokers, will almost all be arrested and sent to the labor camps. Later, a few with specialist abilities may be released, if they have survived, and put to work in the State monopolies.

On the other hand, if you are in a small business and have not given offense in other respects, you may be allowed to go on operating during an interim period. Be prepared to accept detailed instructions as to how to proceed. Raw materials and their distribution will be under central control from the outset, as we indicated earlier, and they will be in short supply; but failure to fulfill your quota and meet your obligations will not be excused on the grounds that you could not obtain your raw materials through legal channels. Unfortunately, if you are enterprising enough to obtain them illegally or on the black market, that will not be condoned either. You will be between a rock and a hard place. Moreover the taxation on your profits, if any, will be extortionate and will change in a capricious fashion. Your operations will be further hampered by the fact that a “representative” of your employees (really a nominee of the Party) will have the power to oversee all your activities.

Once the transition is over, your business will revert to the State. If you accept this in what your bosses would regard as a constructive manner, there is a faint chance that you might be retained as a manager on a lower level, although it is more likely that you will be transferred to some job in the local economic administration. There it is not impossible that you might be able to work obscurely for a number of years until such time as one of the new generation of Party-trained administrators is ready to take over. Even then, if you become a model of obedience, you might manage to become a janitor or junior clerk in some institution or even be given a small pension.

Whatever happens to you, your class origins will have been recorded on your identity documents and will remain a stigma for the rest of your life. Your children, because of their own class origins, will in all cases be denied equal opportunity in education, in obtaining jobs, and in all other walks of life.

Chicano, Mexican, Spanish American

As in the case of the blacks, the Communists will make every effort, particularly in the earlier days of the Occupation, to harness Chicano aspirations in their own interests.

And, as with blacks, all Chicano organizations will be taken over by Communist appointees, and any who resist this will be disposed of.

There seems to be a real possibility that the Communists—whose administrative principle in the USSR and elsewhere has been a linguistic one—might eventually create a Chicano autonomous area in the Spanish-speaking borderlands or even erect a new state (or possibly cede a strip of territory to a new Soviet Mexico). On the other hand, recent Soviet policy has tended away from such arrangements in favor of giving a preponderant role to economic and administrative factors. Moreover, for a considerable time the idea of leaving America looking on the surface as it always was and thus giving the majority a stable and “patriotic” impression will weigh heavily. In principle, although using lesser nationalisms as weapons in the struggle for power, the Communists rely basically, where they can, on the large industrial state. They will seek to make the United States their main bastion on the continent, basing themselves as far as possible in the majority section.

Different communities will in any case receive different treatment. For instance, the Spanish-speaking community of Florida, with its high proportion of anti-Castro refugees from Cuba, will suffer probably more than any other section of the United States’ population. Their mass transfer back to Cuba as forced laborers, after the execution of the more notable anti-Communist figures, will be automatic unless Castro, or his successor, prefers to leave them to disposition by the Soviet-American secret police, in which case few will escape the Arctic labor camps.

Illegal immigration will cease. Border controls, even between Communist states, are very strict. (And when people cannot move even within their own country without identity documents, and they have to register with the police when outside their hometown, movement will in any case be difficult.) Indeed, depending on their judgment of economic and political needs, it seems probable that the Soviet authorities will initiate a repatriation program for any Chicano labor they regard as surplus.

A Sovietized America will anyhow not be much of an attraction for the poor even of Sovietized Mexico or Colombia.

Chinese American

All Chinese Americans will be automatically suspect. This will apply whether they have shown any sympathy toward the Chinese People’s Republic or to its rivals on Taiwan or whether they have been completely apolitical. If China has still to be overrun by the Soviet Union, they will be regarded as potentially active partisans of the enemy and will be deported from such sensitive areas as the Pacific Coast. Even if and when China has been conquered, they will continue to be looked on as inherently untrustworthy and will be subject to a higher rate of arrest than the ordinary population.

Civil Servant

Russians have always been dedicated pen pushers, and like all inefficient social systems, the Soviet Union is a bureaucrats’ paradise. There will be no lack of reports to compile and forms to fill in, with a corresponding need for hordes of clerks. Senior civil servants will have been removed, but if you are a junior officer in a noncontroversial department, if you stay at your desk, don’t argue with your superiors, and keep your eyes on your work, you will have a good chance of keeping your job until younger and better-oriented people can be produced. Millions of posts of sorts in the civil service, and in the even more greatly enlarged local administrations, will become available for those thrown out of work by the cessation of various productive enterprises. Real wages will be low, but little real work will be required.

Clergyman

All churches will be registered. They will come under the leadership of officially approved boards responsible to the Religious Affairs Office of the government. A selection of pro-Communist clergy of each denomination will be solicited as members of “peace” committees and other similar bodies. Government policy towards the churches will vary. There will be periods, particularly in the early days, when church leaders who are reluctant to submit to official control will be arrested and subjected to public “trials,” after which they will be sent to prison or a labor camp. Local clergy will also be liable to mass arrest.

It will be general policy to close down as many churches, seminaries, and theological colleges as possible, while leaving enough to justify the assertion that religious liberty is not being infringed. Large sums and spacious premises will be given to the League of Militant Atheists; antireligious museums will be opened in the main cities; and courses of atheist lectures will be given throughout the country on Lenin’s principle that: “Every religious idea, every idea of God, even flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness.”

It will be illegal to teach children a religious faith. This will be hard to enforce on a family basis, but priests and rabbis who feel it their duty to teach children religion will be arrested when caught.

A few minor religious groups, including the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Ukrainian Uniates, will be totally suppressed; and others, including the Mormons and Christian Scientists, will be treated with notable rigor.

The Jewish religion will suffer severely; only a few synagogues will remain open, the Hebrew scriptures will be hard to obtain, and pressure will be brought to prevent the baking of matzohs. Many rabbis will be arrested on trumped-up charges of black market activity.

Baptists will also be peculiarly ill regarded by the Communist authorities since, although they will have imposed on them an official leadership appointed by the State, it has been found that everywhere in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union—and the same will presumably happen in America—they reject such leadership and tend to set up illegal or semi-illegal structures of their own. The Russian answer will be mass arrests, but even so they will be unable to root out the movement entirely.

The choice for the clergy of other religious bodies is either to return to the catacombs or to try to reach an accord with the State to leave them at least a few seminaries and churches. They will then have to devote much time to keeping as much control as possible out of the hands of agents intruded by the State. Church leaders taking this option will face a hard and continuous balancing act and many problems of conscience.

Perhaps we should note that, in spite of the hostility of communism to religion as such, there have always been a small proportion of clergy willing to support communism. Some of them do so out of venality or from a perverted idealism. Such “people’s priests” are flattered and accorded a high ration scale and are well looked after. Unfortunately for themselves and for the cause that they have elected to serve, they are despised by everyone, including the Communists themselves.

Finally, may we say that members of all denominations may draw strength and encouragement from the fact that communism, in spite of titanic efforts, has nowhere proved effective in extirpating religious faith. Indeed, there are many cases of heroic clergy and laymen surviving successive sentences in the labor camps, where they brought hope and succor to their fellow inmates, and have remained inspirational figures to their flocks and fellow worshipers.

Communist

Your immediate future is bright. Whatever your field, you will find yourself elevated to a leading position. The small size of the Party need not worry you. In central and Eastern Europe, particularly in Romania and the Baltic states, Communist parties that had no more than a few hundred members were rapidly expanded into organizations capable of ruling the entire country. However, during the first period, members will have to be recruited or retained in the Party without too much regard for their moral or ideological suitability, so you will need to get used to working at close quarters with the careerists, psychopaths, and other dubious characters who have been accepted in order to swell the membership of your organization. Nevertheless, within it, you and your fellow veterans will remain the directing element.

On the other hand, this can prove a doubtful privilege as experience shows that such “old Communists” are never entirely fit to be the perfect bearers of the Russian will. Some of you will turn out to have been hopelessly infected by the non-Communist atmosphere of the pre-Soviet United States. Others among you will discover that the new order does not conform to the enthusiastic expectations you had formed, while still others of you will find yourselves resenting having to take orders from Russians and increasingly unable to conceal it. Some of you may let this become apparent, when it will be necessary to purge you from the Party; in which event your prospects will become precarious indeed. Communists who have found themselves in opposition to the Soviet-supported leadership may anticipate prison, at best, and often torture, the confession of their crimes, and execution. Others will keep quiet and carry on without any heart for it. In many cases it is found that these gradually become hardened, until they cease to listen to the internal voice of conscience or even of experience. Indeed, those who put a foot wrong once, and teeter on the brink of arrest but are given another chance, have often turned out to be the very worst of the new ruling class trying desperately to prove their loyalty. Even this will seldom save you in the long run.

Contractor

The whole principle of “contracting” is contrary to Communist theory. You will be nationalized and competition will cease, together with profits and adequate wages.

Criminal

The conditions of shortage that will prevail for many years will offer continuous opportunities for the individual criminal and for localized crime rings. The authorities will be too preoccupied with political offenders to give much time to ordinary wrongdoers. On the other hand, if mugging or theft become unduly obnoxious in a given area, they will be suppressed by police firing squads. And there will be periodic crackdowns on the major black-market operations.

Criminals sentenced and sent to forced-labor camps will, as we saw in an earlier chapter, receive better treatment than political prisoners. They will be encouraged by the guards to become gang bosses and to beat and bully prisoners who are stigmatized as “enemies of the people.” They will enjoy softer working conditions and may be able to divert the bulk of the camp rations to their own use, to consume or to use as currency.

Dentist

The level of dental care in the population will fall. Especially during the first few months, dental stocks will dwindle and dental equipment will deteriorate for lack of spare parts and specialized servicing. Dental techniques will become basic, with extraction taking precedence over filling. Dentures will be poorly made and ill fitting when available. At times extractions will have to be performed without anesthetic because of the absence of supply. Many dentists will give up in despair or because they cannot accede to the decline in professional standards. Receptionists, nurses, and dental technicians will, in general, become a thing of the past, and as well as accustoming themselves to carrying on their businesses single-handedly, dentists should be willing to contemplate receiving payment in kind rather than cash. Those dentists who have acquired as a curiosity, or have perhaps inherited, one of the old-fashioned treadle-operated drills might consider taking it out and dusting it off, since in times of electricity failures and shortage of spare parts, it might prove more reliable than more up-to-date models.

None of the above will apply to dental specialists with a clientele among the elite and the senior occupation officials.

Eventually the entire profession will be incorporated into a Soviet-style health service as government employees.

Doctor

Many doctors will be regarded, for political and class reasons, as enemies of the people. But the Communist State will stand in urgent need of the medical profession since, even if the takeover of the United States were to prove unexpectedly peaceful, the disruption of public services will soon lead to epidemics on a large scale. As the levels of nutrition sink, the health of the population will further decline. Doctors who survive will therefore be in a comparatively favorable position; and those who are outstanding specialists will thrive even more because their services will be in demand by members of the Communist hierarchy itself, either in Washington or in Moscow and Leningrad.

That is not to say that such medical specialists should not adopt certain precautions. If rival schools spring up over aspects of medical treatment or biological theory, the leading proponents of the vanquished school will pay the price. Do not commit yourself too firmly. Leading specialists must also be warned that if they treat political notables, it can be very dangerous if their patients die on their hands.

It has happened twice in the Soviet Union that whole groups of doctors in this situation have been given particularly bad treatment at the hands of the secret police as “murderers in white coats.”

Doctors in a more humdrum way of business should read the entry Dentist above. In time, of course, all doctors will become State employees; and hospitals and clinics will be Communist-run, which will entail an increase in employees and a decrease in effectiveness. Though private practice will not be illegal, it should be conducted with the utmost care. Watch out for dissatisfied or neurotic patients who may denounce you. When in his sixties, Russia’s leading heart specialist was jailed on a fake charge of assaulting a patient, to give the secret police the opportunity to soften him up for more serious accusations.

Dressmaker

Existence will be extremely difficult at first; but eventually people will need to squeeze a longer life out of their old clothes or will need to get them cut down for younger members of the family. Those who do not possess, or cannot master, the necessary skills will turn to you. Be prepared to offer to mend curtains and perhaps develop a sideline with the lighter types of upholstery. It will be a hand-to-mouth existence, but when all shops have become nationalized you may have a chance of being taken on as a government employee. If not, it may still be possible for you to eke out a living in a private capacity, in conjunction with a sister or daughter, from your own house or apartment or, rather, room.

Drugtaker

At first, drug addicts and drug dealers will probably be shot. Later, they will receive the current Soviet sentence of five years for possession of drugs, including marijuana, and ten years for pushing or influencing other people to take drugs. These sentences are served in labor camps.

Eastern European American

The Russians will probably mete out severer treatment to Americans who are of Eastern European stock than to those whose forebears came from Western Europe. The reason is simple: Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia are close to the Soviet Union, and most Americans migrating from those countries are well informed about Soviet imperialism. American citizens of Eastern European origin who can be identified as in any way anti-Soviet will be among the first to be pushed into the cattle trucks.

On the other hand, the Russians will, as with other groups, want to utilize the American Poles, the American Hungarians, and the rest in an active fashion, to further their own aims. All their organizations will be brought under control, and there will be a great expansion of the existing “friendship societies” with the Eastern European countries.

Ecologist, Environmentalist

You must remember that the plan will impose on the Party secretary of your State, and his subordinate the governor, the maximum they can cope with. To fulfill a timber plan (for example) they will have to make irreplaceable inroads into the forests. After all, the next year they may receive a transfer or promotion and it will be their successor who is blamed for any later shortfall. Similar considerations apply to pollution, which has produced a stinking morass to accompany the hydroelectric developments on the Volga, lifeless stretches on the Caspian and Lake Baikal, and the erosion of the ancient statues of Prague by lignite fumes.

The Party and government in the USSR and other Communist countries do not intend these results, even though production always comes first. If you can assemble a small group of scientists who are politically impeccable, they may be allowed to make representations about particularly horrible offenses to the environment, and in some cases, improvement will be effected—especially if it can be shown that the pollution has a long-term ill effect on productivity. But no public organization, demonstration, or other activity will, of course, be permitted. As for nuclear power stations (under strict Soviet control for reasons of military security), they will be developed to the limit. No sort of objection to them will be permitted in any circumstances.

However, there will be one area in which improvement will have been made: the shortage of private cars will mean less pollution from gasoline.

Economist

“Bourgeois” economics will, in principle, be a banned subject. If you have been prominent in any of the fields covered by this term, and in particular if you have justified the free-market system, you have no professional future and had best seek a job in accountancy. If you have worked on purely quantitive matters, and are prepared to give the appearance of accepting the set of abstract dogmas called Marxist economics, you may well find employment (probably under Soviet advisers) in one of the agencies of the new State Planning Committee.

One of your problems will be that many of the statistics you will need to work with are either unavailable or falsified—as with the present Soviet method of estimating grain yields, which exaggerates them by an estimated 20 percent.

You will find that even your Soviet colleagues would wish the government to use genuinely economic methods but that they have mostly given up hope that anything but purely administrative methods of compulsion will be allowed. We advise you to remain discreet in any discussion of this.

Engineer or Technician

You will be in great demand. Nonetheless, because of your “class” origin, you will not be regarded as wholly trustworthy, so you will be under rather strict supervision. Some of you will be compelled to “volunteer” to go to the USSR to operate the American machinery that has been taken there and to instruct Soviet technicians in its use. You will be paid well by Soviet standards, but you should prepare yourself for a different style of life.

However, most of you will be employed in developing American industry under the new system, and since that system is inefficient and yet exerts grinding pressure on all concerned, in it you will find yourself at constant risk. For example, in a desperate effort to meet unrealistic quotas, directors will have no choice but to relax or abandon safety standards, which will result in disasters. For every type of shortcoming the “bourgeois” engineer is the natural scapegoat and will figure prominently in trials for “sabotage.”

We therefore suggest that senior engineers and technicians should try to gain employment in enterprises where raw materials are in fairly regular supply and where safety factors are not paramount. Where possible, you should stick to the development rather than the production side of industry and, whenever you can, get any instructions that look as if they might lead to trouble in writing, make two copies, and keep a copy at home. If the enterprise that you direct or in which you are a prominent figure seems likely to land you in danger, you will not be allowed to resign without permission; but by keeping your eyes open early enough, you may conceivably be able to escape in time by finding some other plant that will request a transfer for you. Your main danger, apart from these, will raise its head in ten of fifteen years’ time, when the new dispensation will have trained enough indoctrinated Communists to take over management. (See also Businessperson above.)

Farmer

If you are a big farmer, your farm will be immediately confiscated and will be run by a Communist official who will be sent to direct it. Your class status will probably entail arrest, although in certain cases you may be allowed, for a time, to work on your former land as an employee. In general, if you have been a successful farmer, even if on a small scale, and particularly if you have employed hired labor, you will be labeled a “kulak” and be subject to deportation. Even if you survive deportation and return to civil life, you will carry the “class” label on your identity documents and remain under a permanent stigma. Your children will be discriminated against with regard to education and jobs.

If you are a farmer on an extremely modest scale, with no hired help, you may at first be rather better treated; and if there are any large landholdings in your neighborhood, you may be given part of them for the time being. However if, as is likely, during the first months and years of the Occupation there are drastic food shortages, you will be required to hand over everything you produce to the State agencies, from whom you will get back whatever they think fit. If the shortages are particularly grave, your crop may be taken without any compensation whatever since it will be regarded as more important to feed the towns than to feed the countryside.

Then, if conditions improve, you may for a while be allowed more latitude and be permitted to sell your produce, under supervision, at something approaching regular market prices.

Thus, even the small farmer is going to be faced with many ticklish problems, of which the plummeting of his standard of living will be the simplest. In fact, it is going to be virtually impossible for the rural population to function at all without making at least some sales (and purchases) through the black market. Official reaction to this is going to be bewilderingly erratic and capricious. Sometimes a local commissar, anxious to save his own skin, will crack down at random on any farmer he catches or suspects. At other times, when he is not under pressure himself and is eager to keep the quotas of his own district respectable, he may decide to turn a blind eye. Orders from the center, too, will vary. Sometimes the need for productivity will take priority and the farmer can breathe fairly freely; but this policy may be abruptly and arbitrarily reversed, and the call will go out for tighter control. If you are a small farmer, we can only tell you to keep your eyes open for these developments and trim your conduct accordingly.

On past form, you should remember that, once the 20–30 percent of the adult population who are suspect for other reasons have been dealt with, it is always the farmer who is the first victim of mass operations against society in general. Sooner or later, the Russians always impose their own system of farming. In some cases, there has been no intermediate period at all, and collectivization has been introduced at once without any preliminary phase. In America, it is almost certain that a more gradual approach will be attempted. In any event, after a longer or shorter interim, many small farmers will in turn be declared kulaks and deported to the Arctic, while the rest will be ordered to merge their farms with those of their twenty or thirty nearest neighbors. If you are among these, you will be permitted to keep an acre or two and a few animals in your own name. The rest will cease to be your property, and you will work your “collective farm” with your neighbors under a Communist-appointed director sent in from the city. No later than the time of the collectivization, the system of identity cards will be transformed into a system of internal passports, whereupon the rural population will be discouraged from leaving the countryside by being forbidden to visit even the local town for periods of more than five or six days.

The individual’s chance of arrest and deportation during the actual collectivization campaign is perhaps one in eight, higher in the case of farmers in prosperous areas.

Feminist

Full equality of both sexes will be officially decreed. However, no “affirmative action “ in the case of women or any other section of the community will be taken or permitted, and you will be expected not to voice any complaints you may have in this regard. No attempt will be made to secure female participation in any job through quotas, and in practice very few women will attain positions or high-salary brackets within their profession. In Communist countries, women traditionally predominate in teaching and the lower ranks of the medical profession and are prominent in manual labor in the cities and particularly on the farms but rarely attain important political or professional status.

Present-day feminist organizations will be wound up, but a women’s organization under Communist supervision will be set up, with the main object of establishing “friendly relations” with their Russian women’s counterpart and the preaching of “peaceful reconciliation.” Posts in it will be available to American women with organizational experience, especially those now prominent in pro-Soviet women’s bodies. It might also be noted that mass arrests will have removed more men than women, in the proportion of perhaps ten to one, and conscription into the “American People’s Army” will have drained millions of able-bodied young men from the normal work force. Farms will have been particularly effected, with the result that unskilled manual labor on the land, as elsewhere, will rely to a great extent on women.

Filmmaker

Conditions with regard to schooling, registration in a union, and State control, are the same as those for painters and sculptors (see Artist). Film style will be that of socialist realism. Directors who attempt to be too clever and are caught by the censor or secret police will suffer the same penalty as given such men as Sergei Paradjanov, maker of two of the few interesting modern Soviet films, Sayat Nova and Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors. In January 1974, he was arrested and sent to a labor camp on a charge of homosexuality. It is KGB policy, when destroying a person on political or other grounds, to discredit them morally for good measure. (See also Actor, Musician.)

Financier or Financial Consultant (see Banker; Businessperson)

Fireman

State employee. Lower salary. No strikes.

Funeral Director

Services will be speedy, drab, and uniform. Atheist forms of committal will be encouraged, religious forms banned or perfunctorily performed. Mortuary “chapels” will be secularized, and only in rare cases will services be carried out in cathedrals, churches, chapels, or other religious buildings, the majority of which will in any case be closed or devoted to nonreligious uses (see Clergy). However, Communist burials, while lacking frills, will at least be inexpensive. You will eventually become a state employee.

Furniture Maker or Dealer

The majority of furniture stores will close. Most citizens will lack the funds to buy new furniture and will make do with what they have. The furniture industry will be State-owned, and when it gets back on its feet, its products will be of poor quality and indifferent design.

Garage or Gas Station Owner or Employee

As we saw in the last chapter, private motoring will have enormously decreased. There will be very few cars on the roads and consequently no need for a large number of gas stations. The oil companies will in any case be nationalized, and there will be only one brand and probably only one grade of gas. Even large cities will possess only a handful of gas stations, usually tucked away in obscure and inconvenient spots. (The elite will have their own gas stations, limousines, and chauffeurs.) Although there are fewer cars, production and servicing standards will be such that motor mechanics’ skills will be saleable on the black market. And you may also try your hand at, and profit by, the repairing and refurbishing of bicycles.

Hawaiian

Because of the strategic importance of Hawaii, halfway between the United States and China and in a position to dominate the Pacific, stringent measures will be called for. The able-bodied members of the population, including the native Hawaiians, will join a “voluntary” defense organization to build, in their spare time, underground bunkers and fortifications or to enlarge and strengthen those that already exist. The remainder are likely to be shipped to the mainland as with Japanese-Americans (see below). In time, Hawaii will most probably be seeded with Russian colonists in order to make it totally secure. Old Russian claims to the islands are likely to be revised, and direct annexation to the USSR is probable, as will also be the case with Alaska. (The USSR has annexed territory from all the Communist countries on which it borders.)

Homosexual

Male homosexuality is illegal under all Communist regimes. The usual sentence will be five to ten years in a labor camp. As with other regulations, this will not be invariably enforced if political considerations make it convenient in individual cases to proceed otherwise. The regime occasionally prefers to secure the collaboration of the homosexual by holding the other alternative over him. In the takeover period, the police will probably be too busy to pay much attention to the persecution of homosexuals in general, but gay liberation and organizations designed to promote their interests will at once be banned, and those who attempt to persist with them will be instantly arrested.

Hospital Employee (see Dentist; Doctor)

Hotel Owner or Employee

Hotel owners will be dispossessed and, if they are fortunate, may be given employment in lower grades of the industry. Those hotels that are permitted to continue will operate in a notably run-down condition, although some of the luxury hotels will be maintained at a level somewhat below their best in order to cater to the Soviet and Communist elite and other important visitors. In these major establishments, all rooms will be bugged, with a special central office listening in at all times. Only “cleared” and reliable staff will remain, and they will be required to act as government informers. In ordinary hotels, also State-run, jobs will be available at a reduced salary, but there will be less work to perform as little service will be given beyond the provision of a more-or-less clean room.

Indian (Native American)

The Communists will make what use they can of Indians and the Indian movements, although they will not have the priority given to the more numerous black and Chicano elements.

The reservations, probably renamed “autonomous areas.” will be maintained, but the inhabitants will have no right to the oil and other resources in them, which will be the property of the State. And there will no longer be any bar to white or other settlers. The Indians will become citizens, although of course, the advantages of citizenship will be few. A few select Indians will be given impressive-looking posts, largely of a cosmetic nature; for example, there will be an Indian commissioner for native American affairs together with a number of Congressmen of the new style.

Indian organizations will be purged of any independent elements of leadership. As the record of the tribes and many subgroups in the Soviet Union shows, it will be difficult to find any Indians who are real Communists, or even near-Communists, to be heads of the administration of the autonomous areas; the Communists will have to make do with supervision by unobtrusive white “advisers.” Indian languages, dances, customs, and folkways will be encouraged but guided into the desired channels. For example, new “folk songs” will be required, extolling the virtues of communism. At the same time, as elsewhere, Indians will be forced into collective farms. Those who live a mobile existence, such as the Navajo, will be compelled to settle.

In general, the interests of the State economy will be put before those of the small peoples. A Soviet commentator has written of similar groups in areas in the mountains bordering China:

But not too difficult to guess; and for Khakass, Shor, Altai, read, in the American context, Navajo, Hopi, Apache.

In the Soviet Union, mountain and desert peoples like the Chechens and Kalmyks, resembling many of the Western Indians, were driven into a more desperate resistance than that of any section of the population; and several were among those later deported en masse (men, women and children) to Siberia, although some of these were later allowed to return.

Meanwhile, those of you who inhabit mountain or desert country will possess certain advantages in that it will be difficult to keep you under constant observation and control. Our advice is: Keep your more unassimilable customs and folkways as far out of sight as possible; take what you are given; do not be deceived by temporary advantages; and unless you are desperate, do not offer resistance. But you will be prepared, if you do become desperate, to revert to the guerrilla-type existence of your forefathers. You should be more successful than most.

Industrial Worker

In theory, you will be the bulwark of the new socialist America.

You and everyone else will read a vast amount of propaganda about your heroic efforts in industry, and about your devoted loyalty to the new “workers’ state.” Control of your organizations will be the major concern of the Communist party (see Trade Unionist).

All this will have some slight advantages, up to a point. Over minor offenses, for example, you will be treated comparatively lightly. With major matters such as opposition to the regime, on the other hand, your status will count against you since you will have proved yourself a “traitor to your class.” After the needs and wishes of the new bureaucratic elite have been satisfied, your children will, in the first decade or so have preferential access to education and indoctrination.

You will find a good many changes in your work. Trade unions will be totally under Communist control, and while they will administer holiday and insurance funds, they will have no right to oppose the management. The basic rule to which everything else must cede is the fulfillment of the “plan.” Since this is allotted from Washington, it will often be unrealistic, and you will be forced to work a great deal of overtime, almost invariably without special payment—especially toward the end of each month.

You will be issued a “labor book” that will list your successive jobs, with each management’s comments on your reasons for being transferred, including censure.

It has been the industrial working class above all, in spite of the pretenses of the Communist party, which has been the backbone of resistance in the Communist lands; as in Plzeň and East Berlin in 1953, in Budapest and Poznan in 1956, in Gdansk and elsewhere in 1970, and finally in the great Polish Solidarity movement today—to name some major worker militancy in Soviet-controlled countries. And in the Soviet Union itself, huge worker outbreaks have taken place in the last couple of decades in places like Novocherkassk, Temir-Tau, Krivoy Rog, Dneprodzerzhinsk.

These are signs that the worker does not really do very well out of the system administered in his name. But they also show that in certain circumstances worker unrest can spearhead major revolt against the regime. It is notable that some of the most powerful outbursts, even in the USSR itself, have come when economic resentment has been linked with political resentment—some Soviet riots and strikes were touched off by economic suffering, others by workers’ resentment at their colleagues being jailed and beaten to death by the police. But the most powerful movements of all have taken place when worker resentment has been linked with national hatred of the Soviet occupier. You will probably find this to be the case in America.

Insurance Agent or Insurance Company Employee

Insurance companies will be immediately nationalized and their capital confiscated. Insurance will become a prerogative of the State or its subsidiary, the “Trade Unions,” and you may be employed in the State insurance organization.

Japanese American

If Japan has not been conquered, all Japanese Americans will be regarded as adherents of a hostile power. They will automatically be deported from the Hawaiian Islands, California, and the other Pacific states. This will remind the older among them of their fates in 1942, with the difference that similar deportations under Soviet rule have resulted in an average 30 percent death rate.

Jewish

Many Jewish groups will find themselves in immediate trouble for a wide variety of reasons. They may be capitalists or involved in non-Communist politics or, in the specifically Jewish context, be Zionists or rabbis. Even if you have not given offense in any of these respects, you will inevitably find yourself, if you are Jewish, in a paradoxical situation. As with every other “ethnic” group, there will be an effort to use your organizations over the transitional stage; yet, at the same time, you will automatically be more suspect than your Gentile equivalent. This even applies to the Jewish Communist, who will be regarded with more distrust than his Gentile comrade when it comes to sniffing out deviation. So, unless you are an exceptional creature who can be manipulated as a “show Jew” and as a docile “leader” of the Jewish community, your prospects are shaky. This is not to say that every Jew will be arrested (though such a plan does seem to have existed in the Soviet Union in 1953), or even that you will automatically lose your job; but it does mean that certain professions will be largely or wholly closed to you. The maintenance of your Jewish identity will be discouraged, the Hebrew language will be virtually banned, and while Yiddish will be permitted, no Yiddish theatres will be open and no Yiddish books will be printed, although a few small-circulation Yiddish Communist newspapers will probably survive. As for anti-Semites, they will, of course, provided they can pass muster on other grounds, be very welcome to the regime, particularly as propagandists.

John Birch Society Member

Your life will, of course, be automatically forfeit. However, if you are determined to preserve it at all costs, your chances are a good deal better than those of, say, the Maoists or the Trotskyites (see below) at the other end of the political spectrum. In East Germany, large numbers of ex-Nazis were admitted to the Communist party, to some extent because the Nazis and the Communists had similar authoritarian affinities but, more importantly, because, to save themselves, the Nazis had nowhere else to go; and the Communists were glad to accept them since they needed any recruits they could get. (At one time the Communist Central Committee, the highest organ of the DDR, contained fourteen ex-Nazis to merely two ex-Social Democrats.) Even more encouraging is the example of Piasecki, once the leader of the very small and very extreme Polish Fascist party. When he fell into Russian hands, he was told by Ivan Serov himself, deputy head of the Soviet secret police, that he was as good as dead already, but if he agreed to collaborate, the Russians could use him. He was made head of PAX, a body directed toward the subversion of the Catholic Church and, at the same time, was allowed or encouraged to carry out private financial transactions that made him the richest man in Poland. So you can see that there is no need to despair, and that, paradoxically, if you are a right-wing politician with a strong anti-Communist record, you may yet have a better future (at least for the time being) than many of your more “progressive” colleagues. As in the case of Piasecki, you can take additional heart from the case of Tatarescu in Romania. He had actually been a signatory of Hitler’s Anti-Comintern Pact; but while Socialists and moderates were being arrested, the Russians made him foreign minister, a post that he managed to hold for some years.

Journalist (Newspaper, Magazine, TV)

If you are a political columnist or commentator, or have otherwise become known for ideas antipathetic to the Communist view, you will have little chance of remaining at liberty. Anyhow, you will have no future in journalism. If the offense you have committed is judged to be minor, you might be able to secure some sort of job in the bureaucracy. We would suggest that you acquire some appropriate skill such as bookkeeping. If your field has been reasonably far removed from politics, however, you may be allowed to carry on for a time until you can be replaced by a young Communist who has been trained to present your subject in an impeccable Marxist-Leninist light.

Censorship will be imposed immediately on the arrival of the Russians and all “anti-Soviet” staff will be turned off. Newspapers that are considered to have had a particularly anti-Soviet bias will be expropriated and handed over to the Communist party or some other Communist-sponsored organization. In any case, one or other of the main newspapers and television stations in each locality will be delivered up to the Party and renamed. Those non-Communist papers and stations allowed to survive will be given the task of representing the views of the “Democratic” and “Republican” parties which form part of the “coalition” government until they too fade away.

Ku Klux Klan Member

Your organization will be suppressed. Trials will be held in Washington and in the South in which men totally without KKK sympathy or background will be branded as such. The Soviet authorities will have little use for real KKK members, who are seldom as “literate” as John Birchers (see above); but those who have specialized in anti-Semitism and have any journalistic or demagogic flair may come to some arrangement, and be retrospectively proved not to have been KKK men at all.

Lawyer

Lawyers will, in general, be regarded as a hostile class element. This will be more so in their case than similar strata because so many of them are involved in the public life of pre-Occupation America and concerned with rights, balances, constitutionality, and common law—all totally opposed to the Communist principle.

Casualties, therefore, will be high.

However, under the leadership of lawyers already of Communist persuasion, of whom there are some, a new body of lawyers will be built up, in which, if you survive and are able to accept education in the newer legal principles, you may obtain employment.

Some lawyers will be needed, especially those with the histrionic talents of an Andrei Vishinsky, for the upcoming series of spectacular show trials. Compliant judges will also be required.

The profession will, naturally, be brought under control like the others. A well-purged “bar association” will be headed by Communist officials. Judges at all levels who are still at their posts after the first phase will be replaced “constitutionally.” Where they are at present elected, Communist-style elections will provide suitable replacements. Where they are appointed, as with the Supreme Court and so forth, the new political leaders will act accordingly.

The new judges will interpret the Constitution to suit the wishes of the occupying power and the processes of Sovietization.

Should any constitutional amendments be required, they will be dealt with by the puppet Congress and through fake popular votes. In fact, Communist-type constitutions are full of the same sort of guarantees of civic rights as are to be found in the present Constitution of the United States. But a few changes will nevertheless be necessary—in particular, say, a Thirtieth and Thirty-first Amendment, respectively—institutionalizing the Soviet economic system and officially making the Communist party the central power in the land.

If you do continue to practice, you will have to change your courtroom style. In a Soviet-type court, especially where there is any trace whatever of a political tinge to the case, lawyers are not expected to get into arguments. The defense lawyer, in particular, is supposed to represent not so much the interests of his client as those of the community; and there have been many cases under this system in which they have strongly dissociated themselves from their client’s pleas of innocence.

You will not, moreover, be operating in a private and independent capacity. You will be a member of the “collegium” of lawyers in your area, paid and controlled by the State, and allotted to clients as suits the authorities.

Unless you have a very strong stomach, therefore, our advice would be that you abandon the profession at the outset. So you should now put your mind to training yourself for some other means of supporting your family.

Librarian

Your job will be comparatively safe, if you can bear the conditions imposed on you. Your first duty will be to carry out the removal from your shelves of a large part of their contents. Politically unsuitable books, together with those considered pornographic or decadent, will be proscribed; you will be surprised at the manner in which the labels of pornography and decadence have been extended to cover a very wide range of literature. Your old reference books, such as encyclopedias, will be withdrawn and pulped.

You should keep handy a pair of sharp scissors and a supply of paste as you will have to cut out or replace those entries in the new style encyclopedias and reference books that become politically inconvenient—a normal Soviet practice. As the years go by, even the more harmless books on your shelves will be gradually replaced as works commissioned and printed by the State begin to appear in adequate numbers. Experience from the Soviet Union and particularly from Eastern European countries suggests that you will not be kept very busy checking these out. If you can safely save and secrete some of the books that are being discarded, well and good; although your superiors will be on the lookout for this, and it may be hazardous for you or your friends to be caught reading them.

Duplicating machines will be usable by designated staff only, and will be available, even to this degree, only in major libraries.

Maoist

Prospects minimal. Emigrate or die.

Military

Like the Lawyer (above), as a member of one of the principal mainstays and upholders of the American way of life you will be in an unenviable position. Every officer above and including the rank of colonel or naval commander will be detained and will face the probability of being shot. It would therefore be wise to take any early opportunity to seek refuge in a free or neutral country, if any exists and you can get to it. Naval officers should attempt to sail their ships to safe ports, and air force pilots should attempt to head their planes for unoccupied territory.

If this is impossible, as soon after the debacle as you can, you should divest yourself of your uniform and bury it or otherwise get rid of it. You will not want to figure in an American equivalent of the Katyn massacres, in which, in peacetime, fifteen thousand Polish officers had their wrists bound behind their backs with barbed wire and were shot in open ditches. You might also hide or bury whatever arms you possess in a marked spot, in the rather unlikely event that you ever get a chance to return one day and dig them up. Beg, borrow, or steal a suit of civilian clothes; then try to fade unobtrusively into the background, losing yourself in the turmoil around you.

It would be a good idea to try to prepare beforehand a false name, a cover story, and perhaps a false set of papers. In the end you may well be tracked down by the KGB, unless you can escape abroad; but when this happens, enough time may have elapsed for some kind of modified amnesty to have come about, under which you will be eligible only for a term in a labor camp rather than outright execution.

After the American surrender, all the lower ranks, noncommissioned as well as commissioned, will be processed for longer or shorter periods in reeducation camps, where they will be subjected to intensive rectification of their former capitalist illusions. If you appear to be compliant, act slightly stupid, and your recantation and ideological progress are considered satisfactory, you will either be given your discharge papers or inducted into the American People’s Army.

This will have been formed from the rump of the old United States forces, with American, or near-American commanders—some of them without military experience. New draftees will get only three or four dollars a week, if that, but at least in a time of uncertainty they will have a roof over their heads, sound clothes, and a far better ration of food than the civilian population.

Apart from the strategic (missile) forces, which will be taken over intact by the Soviet authorities with all American cadres dismissed at once, the new American People’s Army will include all arms. It will go through a period of intensive purging and equally intensive training under fraternal Soviet instructors. Gradually, as increasing numbers of Communists and Communist sympathizers receive military training, it will be expanded until it can become a useful auxiliary to the Soviet army. In a few years, as in other Soviet colonies, it will be possible to enlarge the new intake until the United States forces (still so called) will be available for Soviet purposes abroad. They will never be regarded as wholly reliable, and secret police security will be extremely thorough, but will nevertheless—and even more for that reason—be thrown into situations where cannon fodder, literally, will be the immediate requirement. In addition to being “advised” by the Russians, you may also find yourself being “advised” by the East Germans since the latter, with their blind discipline, goose-stepping, and general Nazi antecedents have in recent years emerged as the drillmasters of satellite Communist armies, whether in Europe or Africa. Thus Americans, as with von Steuben and his staff in the American Revolution, may once again find themselves obeying Prussian mentors, although hardly in the cause of freedom. You may also be, out of necessity, taking orders from Cubans.

You will serve wherever the Soviet cause dictates.

Conscientious objection will be illegal.

Musician

Music does not speak such a direct and potentially subversive language as literature, so it will not be visited with the same degree of severity. Nevertheless all composers and executive musicians will be supervised through their respective “unions.” If you are a composer and want to be performed, you should forget serial, atonal, aleatory, or other modern techniques. You will find it particularly exasperating to be bullied by fifth-rate composers who occupy positions of power in your union, as occurred with Tikhon Khrennikov, then as now first secretary of the Soviet Composers’ Union, who was encouraged by the oafish Zhdanov to torment musicians of the caliber of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, whom he berated as if they were small boys. As a reward, his tawdry music is regularly performed behind the Iron Curtain, where captive audiences are bidden to applaud it as if it was Beethoven. Even so, classical composers and musicians will be in a better position than popular ones. Much popular music will be banned as “decadent,” and such phenomena as rock concerts will naturally not be licensed. On the other hand, a new type of folk music will emerge, complete with pro-Soviet words and sentiments.

Native American (see Indian)

Navy (see Military)

New Left

You will confront the Russians with a problem slightly different from any that they have previously had to cope with. Generally speaking, yours will be treated in the same way as the more orthodox Socialist bodies, though to the extent that you hold principles advocating a type of socialism radically different from and ideologically competitive with that of the Communists, you will be among the first to face arrest. Otherwise, your organizations, such as they are, will be merged first with those of a new pro-Communist “Socialist party” and then with the Communist party itself.

In any case, you should meanwhile, we feel, make some attempt to come to terms with reality. For example, the Communist party line will not embrace pot smoking, homosexuality, hardly even beards. Therefore, if you are an adherent of the New Left, you should consider (1) getting rid of your drugs, (2) concealing your deviant proclivities, and (3) shaving off your whiskers.

Optometrist (see and compare Dentist)

Pet Shop Operator

It is unlikely that families will be able to spare any scraps of food for feeding pets, let alone extra money for grooming them or purchasing accessories. The various pet industries will be closed down, and most cats and dogs will have to be put to sleep or allowed to run free and take their chances. After the fighting ends, there will, in any case, be a serious infestation of ownerless dogs running in wild packs with which the authorities will have to deal. Owners of pet shops should lose no time making plans for alternative employment.

Pharmacist (see and compare Dentist; Doctor)

Photographer

Supplies will be scarce and unrestricted photographing will, in any case, be severely discouraged. The professional photographers still permitted to operate will be licensed by the State and their output closely scrutinized and controlled.

But there will be considerable demand for photographs of important persons and ceremonies of the new order, and press photography will flourish. You must, however, be ready to abandon “frank” photographs showing politicians from unflattering angles or in awkward or silly movements.

For the photographer not directly employed on a paper, there will also be outlets. The new elite always show an endless appetite for professional-style visual representation of themselves and various aspects of their power and position. You may also find that ordinary families will seek, more than usual, records of their loved ones, in the constant fear that they may be separated at any time by death or deportation. (In labor camps it has often been possible for prisoners to keep small photographs, which have given them some cheer and comfort.)

If you are skilled at montage and general faking of photographs, you may be employed as a specialist on one of the main newspapers or agencies. It is traditional in Communist countries to issue historical and other photographs with changes made to eliminate faces of those who have meanwhile fallen into disfavor or to enhance the status of those who have risen. Cases in the USSR, going back fifty years but practiced to this day, include the mere omission, by brushing out, of major leaders of the revolution like Trotsky; the substitution of a tree for a famous former comrade, Lev Kamenev, in a reproduction of a famous prerevolution photograph; the moving of Georgi Malenkov, a comparatively minor figure when the photo was first printed, to standing alone with Stalin and Mao Tse-tung through the removal of half a dozen intervening figures when Malenkov had become prime minister; the insertion of a nonexistent beard on a figure of unclear status, F. Khodzhayev, in the edited version of a group picture; and quite recently, the transformation of one of a group of five astronauts into a doorpost. So if you have talents in this direction, you may have a prosperous career.

Poison Pen

You will have splendid opportunities to ruin your neighbors, colleagues, and friends by writing anonymous denunciations which have always been much valued in Communist circles, to the secret police. The facts you retail need not in any way be truthful, but it will be nonetheless advantageous to be able to include genuine remarks made by your victims in which they express dissatisfaction with some aspect of the Occupation. If you want to cause even more harm, you can offer your services to the secret police as a “Seksot” or a regular paid informer and collaborator. (Well-organized networks of these “Seksoti” will be set up, covering every area of the United States.)

Policeman

All senior officers will be replaced, and there will be arrests and executions of those of whatever rank who had previously been engaged in combating subversion, putting down riots, or otherwise engaging in “political” activities in support of the previous government. Soviet sympathizers will be given all major posts, and police everywhere will come under the centralized control of a new Department of the Interior in Washington. Some cadres of the regular detective force will be retained, under Soviet direction, until they can be replaced by Communist collaborators. Many traffic police and highway patrols will be laid off since there will be few cars or trucks on the road except those of the occupier, which will move largely in a convoy.

The police will be concerned with issuing permits required for internal travel and with checking on those from out of town registering at hotels and will take on a large staff for such purposes.

The border patrol, together with the immigration service, will come under the direct jurisdiction of the secret police in Washington, who may keep on reliable Americans and seek to recruit more. Movement across national borders will be extremely restricted—unless, in the case of Canada, it is thought convenient to “unite” it with the United States. The Mexican border, in any event, will be equipped with a formidable barbed-wire fence, with watchtowers and searchlights at frequent intervals.

In the course of time, a new special police force of considerable size will be equipped with modern weapons, up to and including light tanks and artillery. This force will be used as the first line in putting down demonstrations or risings against the Occupation, with the Red Army held in reserve.

Priest (see Clergyman)

Printer

Your skills will be much in demand by the authorities. There will be an enormous increase in the number of forms, permits, and general bureaucratic papers. Even more, there will be an enormous output of propaganda material of every type: pamphlets, posters, leaflets, booklets, and books by the hundreds of millions. The main newspapers will appear in enormous editions, again in several millions, even when they are virtually unreadable. Though real circulation will go down, there will be a large forced circulation to all Party and official bodies and individuals, while in the absence of other information, some citizens will continue to buy the papers.

All printing machines and all printing matter will be under very strict control. Unofficial possession of even the smallest press or duplicating machine will be illegal.

Psychiatrist

Western psychiatry is ill regarded in the Soviet Union, and most psychiatry in the present sense will cease and the files of its practitioners will be turned over to the secret police as possible sources of evidence. A Soviet-style psychiatry will take its place, and for those Western psychiatrists who contrive to adapt their theories to Soviet ideology, a small clientele of rich Party officials and their families will be a source of fees. But the massive employment of psychiatry will cease, and you are advised to think about developing other skills. On the other hand, an ambitious and unscrupulous psychiatrist might do well by gaining employment in one of the special police psychiatric hospitals where certain offenders are held and subjected to psycho-chemical abuse (see chapter 3).

Psychopath

If you are able and prepared to control yourself in all matters where you might offend the authorities, a wide field of activity of a type you will find rewarding will remain open to you. Those not afflicted with consciences will be much in demand not only in occupations offering opportunities of violence (see Sadist) but also in all other institutions, where it will always be possible to denounce anyone who stands in the way of your desires or to blackmail them into submitting.

Indeed, the Soviet system as consolidated by Stalin and perpetuated by his successors has been described as a psychopathocracy. If your condition is of the right type, you might rise very high indeed in the new hierarchy.

Publisher

There will be a short interim period before all publishing firms are brought under control of one or another of the Communist-sponsored organizations. But there will be an immediate ban on all “anti-Soviet” literature. Publishers will find that this is interpreted to cover any independent work whatever in the fields of history, economics, politics, and social thought—just as almost all modern American fiction will be banned as “pornographic.”

Many publishers will in any case have been arrested for their earlier purveying of books warning America of the Soviet threat or simply retailing facts about the Soviet regime. Those firms that survive will be taken over as soon as practicable. The new Communist-controlled “writers’ union” will own directly, or through local branches, most of the firms printing literary works proper. The publishing of political, military works, and so forth will come under direct government control; political works being published by the State political publishers, military works by the Department of Defense, and so forth.

If you continue to work in these institutions, you will have to be careful not to offend the censorship. Sticking to the general guidelines will not be sufficient, and even these new Communist-controlled organizations will not be trusted in this sensitive area.

There will be a large body of censors—in Russia it is estimated that there are about seventy thousand of these. Every printed word must be examined by a representative of the Board of Censorship and certified correct before publication. In the case of a book there is first a “precensorship.” If it passes this, some twenty copies may then be printed, after which the presses will be locked and copies sent for approval to a variety of governmental agencies and departments of the Communist party, always including the secret police. When and if all these have approved, printing may take place.

The censors will be guided by an instruction book (the Polish one consists of 700 pages) listing the things that may not be mentioned. These will naturally include anything discreditable about the Soviet Union, the Communist party, and so forth— and in particular any atrocity committed by the Soviet army, any information about the now-flourishing labor camps, any hints that everybody is not happy under the Occupation. There will also be a number of named persons to whom one may not refer because for one reason or another they are in disfavor.

Puerto Rican

Puerto Ricans will, to some degree, be a special case since Puerto Rico itself will probably become an “autonomous” republic in a Caribbean federation dominated by Soviet Cuba. The important Puerto Rican communities in New York and elsewhere will be tightly organized under Communist control, and Puerto Rican Communists will be given a fair proportion of local administrative posts, as with blacks. (See also Chicano, etc.)

Rabbi

Your position will be, as we have suggested, among the worst in religious categories. You should, more than most others, pay particular attention to our advice in preparing for prison and labor camp. (See also Clergymen; Jew.)

Radio Station Operator or Employee (see Television)

Realtor

Private ownership of property and land will be abolished and a decree of total nationalization will immediately go into force. Real estate dealing will thereupon become inoperative.

Restaurant Owner or Worker

A few top-class restaurants will remain in business and, even in famine times, will be provided, for the edification of the Soviet and Communist elite, with a plentiful supply of provisions, including luxuries. Otherwise restaurants and eateries in general may continue under private ownership for a year or so until full nationalization and Sovietization has taken place. However, keeping them supplied will entail your being in constant attendance at the local rationing offices and the necessity for continuous bribes and payoffs.

The prices you will have to charge will probably be beyond the pockets of most citizens, although there will always be a quota of minor officials, police, and so on who will prefer to eat anything and to eat anywhere in preference to their own dreary canteens.

Many cooks and waiters will find that they have no choice left but to work in such canteens, where conditions are notoriously poor, hours indeterminate, and pay minimal. However, wretched though working in State canteens may be, it possesses one advantage not to be despised: access to food. Employees will always be suspected of stealing, and suspected correctly, but the Soviet habit is not to try to enforce the unenforceable in such spheres unless they have some other reason for getting rid of somebody—or unless instructions for a strict purge have come down and they are looking for easily compromised victims.

Eventually the whole restaurant network will be run by the Department of Internal Trade, and quality will suffer accordingly, though restaurateurs who manage to work in them will, as we say, at least eat.

Russian American

Though some will be used by the occupiers as interpreters, and even in political posts, Americans of Russian descent can look forward to especially virulent treatment. We will draw a veil over what will happen to former Russian defectors who fall into Soviet hands.

Sadist

Although the secret police will have some use for torturers, such positions are unlikely to be open except to men with political acumen and training, but low-grade thugs, known as “boxers,” are often employed for routine beatings. Guards will be needed, of course, on a large scale for the new labor camp and prison system and will be more or less free to maltreat prisoners at their leisure. You should be warned, on the other hand, that most of the labor camps are likely to be situated in the most distant and forbidding parts of the continent.

If you apply for a post as an executioner, you might be enrolled in one of the municipal firing squads. Your opportunity to carry out individual executions, if such is your taste, will probably be somewhat restricted. The traditional Soviet method of executing single offenders is by means of a bullet in the back of the neck and is invariably conducted neatly and expeditiously by a specialist of officer rank. Mass executions are bound, of course, to occur, and you may well be given a chance to participate in some of them.

Schoolteacher

Under Academic we have dealt with the situation of the university teacher. In preuniversity education, teachers will find that things are, generally speaking, similar. Instruction in mathematics will continue much as before, but most other subjects will have new textbooks and new curricula. Many texts in English literature will be withdrawn, and there will be an emphasis on Soviet and Communist authors of the social realist persuasion, most of whose works will have the texture of sawdust.

You too will have to teach your pupils versions of history that are entirely untrue. You too will have to lead them in ceremonies of loyalty to the regime. You will spend hours on teachers’ committees in which ways of improving the political education of the children is discussed. But, except in the highest classes, you will not have to teach “Marxism-Leninism” as such, merely a set of easily assimilated ideas, a sort of Communist pap or pabulum. You will find that the Party administrators in charge of you are a low-grade lot since the more educated ones will be spread thin in the universities and elsewhere. They will intervene in the clumsiest and most irritating manner. You must not retort in kind.

Be careful of the temptation, while teaching nonsense, to make your true view of it clear to your students by your tone of voice or the expression on your face. One Soviet instruction typical of many, runs:

Your position will bring you some particularly difficult problems. First, children are more easily influenced than older people, and you will find at least a few of your pupils beginning to believe what they are told day in and day out. You will be tempted to guide them unobtrusively toward the truth. If you do, be sure to be very careful indeed. Once children are persuaded that it is their duty to report you for deviation, it takes little to persuade them to denounce you. There are always smug, nasty-minded children with grudges against everybody, but especially teachers.

Second, you will also find the opposite problem: many children, especially the younger ones, may blurt out true facts or express their true feelings. You will wish to do all you can to protect them and to protect their families from whom they probably imbibed these “errors.” Yet you will have to tell them that they are wrong while making every excuse for them.

This will all be a very harrowing experience, and it is no wonder that teachers have been among the most severely purged professions in all Communist countries. After a while, if you keep your job, you will adjust as best you can. And you will find as time goes by that the children too have adjusted to the situation and no longer betray themselves. As for the minority whom you regretfully see passing from your hands as offensively loyal robots of the regime, do not worry too much. Some, indeed, will go on to become the new generation of Soviet auxiliaries. But many, even those who may be at their worst at sixteen, will become disillusioned as students or in early adulthood.

Military and civil-defense training will be compulsory in all schools, and you will be required to help where necessary.

Scientist

Certain sciences, such as astronomy, will be comparatively free from official intrusion, but most will be subject to State intervention. If you are a practicing scientist in any field particularly useful to the Soviet Union, you are likely to be deported there, although you will be handled more or less with kid gloves as you will be regarded in the same light as valuable livestock. Once in the Soviet Union, you will be housed in comfortable circumstances in special isolated communities, in the Urals or in Siberia. Provided you behave yourself and work hard, you will be well treated as long as your line of research proves fruitful.

Whether you work for the Russians in the USSR or the United States, you will encounter continuous trouble among your Party managers at all levels. Avoid getting involved in all such backbiting and squabbling and devote yourself, as far as possible, to your own concerns. You are, after all, purely as a scientist, likely to find your work absorbing, and it will help you to forget your troubles. You will find it disturbing and infuriating to be herded into mass projects, harangued by officials, and given timetables and deadlines; but as long as you toe the line, you will probably be able to continue with your own line of research, whatever it is, at least for part of the time, and you may be able to overlook the fact that whatever advances you help to bring about will be put to use to increase still further the powers of a tyrannical regime.

The sting may also be lessened by the sympathy of your Soviet colleagues, most of whom will be sensitive people who silently regard themselves as being in the same boat. Now that Soviet science has come of age, there is less likelihood than formerly that you will become trapped in one of the crasser controversies. Vavilov, the great biologist, fell foul of the quack Lysenko, whose theories were endorsed by Stalin, and he died in the Gulag. Stalin also espoused the peculiar theories of the linguist Marr, who claimed that all language derived from only four basic sounds, and many scholars fell foul of the dictator in consequence and wound up in jail. In modern circumstances, the probability of such bizarre episodes has lessened, but the Central Committee still has the last word in scientific matters. You should be alert and try not to get yourself entangled in controversy. Many scientists, mathematicians, and so on are now in jail or exile in the USSR for applying their reasoning powers to political and social matters. Do not despise the minor skills you may have picked up, such as the ability to repair electrical equipment. If you are purged, this may be valuable even in a labor camp, while elsewhere it may provide you with an income.

Socialist

Socialists with ideas about socialism different from the definition of that form of society thought correct by the Soviet authorities will suffer earlier and more severely than mere democrats and capitalists. The leaders of the Eastern European Socialists are mostly dead or in prison, and all their parties have long since been extinguished.

But at first, for a time, the Russians will encourage a Socialist party. It will have as its leadership, if possible, a few prominent members of the present movement with the addition of a few secret Communists. All the smaller Socialist sects will probably be incorporated into it, as we said in an earlier chapter, at a conference run on “constitutional” lines. Those attending the conference will be rendered amenable both by simple, direct pressure and by the absence due to the arrest of those Socialists who have previously shown themselves strongly opposed to the Soviet system.

Within two to three years, any remaining Socialist leaders inclined to show any sign of independence will be eliminated, and the Socialists will be merged (once again “voluntarily”) with the Communist party. A very few Socialist leaders will be accorded positions in the new organization. These, of course, will be men who have already collaborated unreservedly. Even so, few of them will last long. Some will vanish into oblivion, others into the labor camps and prisons, as did the stooge Arpad Szakasits, who betrayed the Hungarian Social Democratic party to the Communists.

Student

You will not get to college if your parents have been classified as social or political undesirables. Children of working-class parents will in principle enjoy preference over middle-class parents, but in fact, the children of collaborators and Party functionaries will have priority, whatever their scholastic abilities. (And the employment by the Communist rich of teachers wishing to supplement their salaries by private tutoring will give them a certain advantage even there.) For ordinary students, as against the children of Party members, the entrance requirements will be stricter than they are now. The curriculum will be drab and examinations will be strenuous. Punctual and regular attendance in class will be obligatory, especially in the courses in Marxism-Leninism. Military and paramilitary training will take place, although this will be in addition to, not in place of, the normal two years of military service that will precede or follow the years at the university. Students will be expected to be polite, and their clothes and personal grooming will be in accord with the institutional dress code. The student leadership will be appointed by the Communist administration, and student protests, strikes, sit-ins, and other demonstrations will be promptly and unequivocally put down if they occur. Offenders will be dismissed from college and sent to jail. Students will also be liable to free and “voluntary” service to the State; for example, at the times of planting and harvesting you can be sent to work for ten hours a day and for a month or six weeks at a time, in the fields with the regular farm workers, picking potatoes, cabbages, beets, and other row crops. This will keep you physically fit but will interfere somewhat with your studies.

As the system settles down, a flourishing market in examination papers, professional examination sitters, and so on will arise. If, even so, you fail your examinations, it will often be possible to buy fake credentials. Influential parents will usually be able to obtain improved marks for their children through threats or bribes—a perennial scandal in the USSR today. (See also Youth.)

Surgeon (see Doctor)

Technician (see Engineer)

Television Station Owner or Employee (see Journalist)

Trade Unionist (see Industrial Worker)

Honest trade union leaders will be bustled off at once to the labor camps. Crooked ones, who can be expected to be familiar with the strong-arm tactics called for in the first days of the Occupation, will last longer. The smaller craft unions will be abolished and those that remain will be concentrated into large, streamlined corporations with all leading posts under direct Party and secret police control. Trade union conferences will rapidly become spectacles at which the decrees and policies of the Party will be ecstatically and unanimously rubber-stamped. This in fact will be the chief function of the trade unions: to facilitate the control, discipline, and unity of the workforce. Questions of pay and working conditions will be of secondary importance and will in practice be the concern of Party officials. To resist or question the decisions of the employer, who will now be the State, will bring you penalties.

The leaders of the Soviet Union are peculiarly sensitive, as the leaders of Communist America will be, to defiance by the workers since it represents the most alarming of the challenges that might be made to their supremacy and right to govern. According to Marxist-Leninist theory, such defiance should simply not occur, so it is very disturbing when it does, and the authorities will react sharply. You should take this into account before you decide to embark on strikes, slowdowns, pay disputes, and all similar overt forms of industrial action, let alone form any genuine union. Remember too that informers and agents provocateurs will be everywhere around you. Do not complain of the tedious factory meetings where you will be harangued by Party functionaries and try not to doze off during the sessions of Marxist-Leninist instruction that will become a regular feature of your working life.

But, as we have said (see Industrial Worker), your chance may come, and you may be able to form genuine works councils in times of crisis and even have them negotiate genuinely with the Communist authorities—although they will eventually be suppressed unless the whole regime is overthrown.

Traitor, Quisling

There will, of course, be many high posts available throughout the police, governmental, and economic machinery for any reasonably qualified traitors. If you are lacking in any qualification, you can work your way upward, say through the ranks of the Seksoti or secret collaborators of the secret police, and you might emerge in the course of time with a satisfactory job in one of those unobtrusive organizations of American nationals under Soviet direction concerned with the pursuit, identification, and betrayal of your fellow citizens.

Travel Agent or Travel Agency Employee

Travel agencies as constituted at present will be shut down, but employment for a certain number of the redundant operatives may become available in local government, supervising the schedules of the crowded trains and buses. Here the principle will be that the lower the level of service, the more bureaucrats will be required.

Trotskyite

In your case the prognosis is so grave that your only alternative to flight would seem to be to prepare to die.

University Teacher (see Academic)

Veterinarian

Not only will the keeping of domestic pets be virtually discontinued, but the general scarcity of funds will mean that the treatment of those that remain will be undertaken at home. We suggest that you equip yourself to specialize in the care of horses and farm animals. There will always be a demand for the latter, and horses will proliferate as cars grow scarcer. You will become a government servant, and a comparatively well-paid one; that is, at about an eighth of your present salary. You must take care at all times that blame for the death of badly managed collective farm cattle is not pinned on you. Above all, if you can, avoid tending horses under Soviet ownership. Many vets were shot for alleged poisoning of Red Army horses in the 1930s, and even if it does not come to that, you could very easily be victimized.

Worker (see Trade Unionist)

Writer

Writers will know better than most people what to expect from the Occupation as they are already well informed as to what happens to their co-writers behind the Iron Curtain and in other Communist countries. If you wish to become a rich, celebrated conformist, you should, of course, begin to familiarize yourself without delay with socialist realism. Cultivate those Communists and Sovietophiles who are already prominent on the cultural scene and who will become your artistic commissars when the Russians arrive. Without their approval, your books are not going to be published, you will receive no literary prizes, and above all you will stand no chance of being included in any of the writers’ delegations that visit other countries. This will not matter if the delegations are going to other Communist countries, as that would afford you little relief from the tedium of the life to which you are already condemned—a tedium that is particularly hard, we might add, for a writer. But occasionally such delegations will visit any countries that have not already been subjugated by the Soviet Union, and then you will have a brief chance, in spite of the secret policeman attached to your group, to see what life is like beyond the prison walls. Take a good look at it; there may not be many such glimpses left.

If you are a real writer, and you can somehow manage to emigrate to a free country before the Soviet army takes over, you should probably make up your mind to go. It will not be an easy decision. You will be reluctant to cut yourself off from your own roots, from your people in their hour of agony, from the sources of your inspiration. It is worthwhile consoling yourself with the thought that many writers before you have chosen to live as exiles and that in many cases emigration has not only not damaged but has actually sharpened their perceptions and intensified their art. We put forward one fact that may help you to decide. In The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (1962), we find that the average age at death of those writers who went into exile after the Russian revolution was seventy-two, whereas the average age at death of those writers who chose to stay behind was forty-five. The higher life expectancy of the exiles was twenty-seven years. (See also Actor; Artist; Filmmaker; Musician.)

Youth

You will find yourself under very heavy pressures of a type to which your present life has not accustomed you.

On the one hand, the Communist victors will hope above all to be able to harness the strength and spirit of the American young to their scheme of things. On the other, young people everywhere, although perhaps especially in America, have a tradition of nonconformity, rebellion against authority, a desire to think for themselves.

We would expect many American young people—especially those young enough not yet to have spouses or children—to throw themselves into the tens of thousands of spontaneous flare-ups of resistance that will mark the early days. Many will be killed, many captured and sent to labor camps. But there will be many survivors; some will join the partisans, and some will fade back into the background, having learned a bitter lesson.

To these latter, during the phase of consolidation of Communist power, we offer the same counsels of prudence we gave their elders. It will be much harder for the young and ardent to maintain the same restraints. You will make the effort. You will grow up, become tempered, and mature very quickly.

The special Communist effort to indoctrinate you will mean that you will be under considerably higher pressures than your elders. Membership of the Communist party itself will probably never be allowed to rise above a few million, and there will be no question of forcing adults, except in certain specialist posts, to join it. The Young Communist League, however, will number tens of millions, and for most jobs available to the young, and studentships at universities, joining will be almost unavoidable. This will mean that you will lose several hours a week at compulsory sessions in Marxism-Leninism, the Communist version of current events, and so forth, in addition to endless harangues about loyalty and the florious future, which you will be expected to applaud.

You will find that the youth leaders who serve the regime, and in particular the secretaries of the Young Communist League branches, are a more repulsive lot than even their adult equivalent. The sulky fanatic, the starry-eyed dupe, the weasel-faced careerist—and after a year or two there will be little to distinguish them—will feel their moral isolation, will lash out mercilessly at any sign of indiscipline, will be in the closest possible contact with the secret police (of which many of them, in fact, will be clandestine members). You will have to learn suspicion, caution, extreme self-control. As soon as the regime is consolidated you will be liable for conscription into the American People’s Army, for a two-year term in peacetime, if any. Discipline will be incomparably tougher, pay lower, leave much rarer than in present day Western armies. Unless your class, family, and general background appear impeccable, you will be restricted to the infantry and need not expect a promotion. In wartime, young and active men who would otherwise have been sentenced to a labor camp will be inducted into “penal battalions” that will be used in particularly dangerous situations such as charging over enemy minefields. The survival rate will be low, but some who have served say that it was even preferable to the slow and mindless dying off in the labor camps.

But with all the casualties your generation will suffer, millions upon millions of you will survive. And on record, the Communists have never succeeded—in spite of appearances to the contrary—in carrying out their program of fully indoctrinating the young. You should remember that the vast majority of your age group, not only in America but throughout the Soviet world, is at heart disaffected. However much, over the years, your immediate needs take precedence, this core of your personality will remain. And you have one great point in your favor: unlike your parents, you may find that the overthrow of Soviet power will come when you are still in the full vigor of, perhaps, your forties, when you will provide the leaders to build a new America and a new world.