What to Do When the Russians Come

6. THE QUALITY OF LIFE

YOU WILL FIND the altered climate of your life hard to adjust to. The first physical and psychological effects of the defeat, however it comes about, will be very terrible and will last months, perhaps years. You will have been shocked into a state of numbness that will rob many people of the will to live, against which you will have to struggle or succumb.

Then, as the Occupation tightens its grip, you will have to accustom yourself to the prospect of living a life that will be totally politicized. In all Communist countries, politics is an obsession, the central core of all thought and activity. You will find that your life is heavily bound up with questions of your own orthodoxy; with matters of heresy, schism, blasphemy, and back-sliding, and of the orthodoxy of the people around you. Not only will you be required to attend lectures on Marxism-Leninism at your place of work, but the newspapers you read, the television you watch, the radio you listen to, even the very streets around you will be filled with Communist slogans and exhortations. You will not be able to attend a football game or walk through a park without being subjected to propaganda speeches from massed loudspeakers. One particular irritation will be the visits of delegations from any still democratic countries, consisting of Communist sympathizers whose fulsome praise for the new order and the happiness of the Americans living under it will be sure to turn your stomach. Such things you will find maddening, but you must accustom yourself to them and put up with them, for to appear bored or hostile will be dangerous. After a time you will find that you hardly notice.

Outside your own home, perhaps even outside your own room in your own home, you feel yourself continuously subject to examination and scrutiny. It will be like living in a fishbowl. Or, to change the metaphor, you will feel as if you had been stripped of your clothes and are walking naked or as if the regime has performed a delicate operation on you that has peeled off the outer layer of your skin. As the Russian writer Isaac Babel remarked, under Soviet communism at its worst, “One only talks freely with one’s wife—at night, with the blankets pulled over one’s head.”

You will find yourself forced to separate your life outdoors from your life indoors, your public life from your private one. You will begin to practice the compartmentalized existence practiced by all people who survive under a Communist dictatorship. You will split your mind into two halves. It is a trick that it will take you some time to acquire; but unless you belong to the minority, tiny and nasty, who will throw in their lot with the Communists, you will eventually learn how to demarcate your activities into a public sphere and an increasingly constricted private sphere. And you must get used to the fact that you will have to do or say something you will hate yourself for at least two or three times a day.

You will do all the things required of you: attend the meetings, march in the parades, chant the slogans, cheer the leaders.

You will at the same time perform an inner withdrawal and cultivate a very intense private life. This is where you must live—inside yourself or within a small circle—and it is a life that will become increasingly precious to you.

You will become gratified at the depth and closeness of your family relationships and your immediate friendships. These profound affections are the compensation, well known in all Communist countries, for the otherwise monotonous and mechanical quality of your existence. You will also find that, beneath the brusqueness and suspicion with which you will treat strangers and outsiders; beneath the endemic bad temper, snarling, and rudeness, there will sometimes spring up a remarkable spirit of kindness and generosity. Deprivation, fear, short rations, endless waiting lines, and the need to be servile will make everyone touchy and quarrelsome. Suspicion will arise between honest men. And yet, people who are companions in misery in their submission to a Communist government, even in Russia itself, are often prompted to behave toward each other with a rare selflessness and compassion.

However, take care not to be too carried away by the warmth of your friendships and family feeling. You will not really be safe even in the bosom of your own family. A specific and very great danger will arise when, after the regime is fully established, your children will have to join the “Pioneers” and will thus become integrated into the Communist system. In addition to providing some military training and running the summer camps, the Pioneers will inculcate the lesson that loyalty to Communism is far more praiseworthy than loyalty to one’s family. As we have said, if you have subversive ideas, you must be very careful not to express them directly in front of your younger children. Even the most loyal child may inadvertently blurt things out and get you into trouble. Some children become brainwashed by the constant propaganda to which they are exposed and become zealous agents of the regime. Such unfortunate girls and boys are singled out and cherished by the Communists. Pavlik Morozov, a boy who during the collectivization of the land in the Soviet Union denounced his parents for hoarding and had them shot, is still lauded as a hero in the USSR and new statues to him have recently been erected. Most parents will try to pass on to their children, as we remarked earlier, decent values, and the general experience from Communist countries is that many succeed. However, you must proceed with the utmost vigilance, especially when your children are at an impressionable and talkative age. Therefore, as you peer out across the ruins, your first duty to yourself and to your loved ones is to practice caution. Every day you will be walking through a minefield. Every caretaker, doorman, porter, elevator man, lavatory attendant, and taxi driver is a potential government informer, not to mention the people with whom you regularly rub shoulders at the office or factory. You will have to consider very carefully the weaknesses of your old friends and acquaintances. And you must never make new friends impulsively or trust first impressions. Enlarge your circle slowly and carefully. You will learn to identify the people who are sympathetic to you and your ideas by subtle signs: a slight smile here, a cautious nod there. Even then you will be very careful. It is true that there may only be one rotten apple in the barrel; but you will not know which it is.

By the way, on the subject of communication, the telephone system will deteriorate rapidly, and you will no longer be able to rely on it to get through on any given day. However, we would advise you to keep your telephone if you can. A friend may be able to give you useful information that is otherwise unobtainable, for example, the appearance of lemons at some market. But do not speak indiscreetly. The chances of being bugged will be very small, especially at first; but as with all your actions, better safe than sorry should be your guiding principle. Similarly, you will not put on paper, in letters in particular, any facts or thoughts that might give offense to the authorities or annoy any individual official.

You might also think of having a radio capable of receiving stations overseas, which may give you better information about what is going on in the United States than you will be able to obtain from official broadcasts. In listening to these, you should also take the customary precautions of keeping the volume low and not having anyone present of whose reliability you are not certain.

There will be times of comparative relaxation as well as ones of intense horror. In these milder times, you still should not talk too freely. Remember that there is a file on you at the local secret police headquarters, and when things get worse again, you may suffer. As a Soviet writer rightly remarked to the American academic Dr. Gene Sosin when congratulated that things were a little easier: “Yes, but what about yesterday—and tomorrow?”

You may have complained, in your time, of the spread of bureaucracy in present-day America. When you come to look back upon it, you will be astonished at its moderation in comparison with what you will now experience. The number of forms to be filled in will increase tenfold. The number of permits, identity cards, labor books, ration cards, and registrations will astonish you. State offices will multiply, and the number of their employees will proliferate. But more importantly, from your point of view, is the fact that you will be entirely at the mercy of the new functionaries. There will be no press, independent lawyer, or politician, nor any other effective means of combating errors, injustices, and bullying. Courtesy toward the citizen will disappear. You will feel that you are mere bureau fodder. But be prepared for it. Get used to it. Study the new forms carefully. Do not be too alarmed if some document goes astray—very few people will be able to keep up fully with all the demands. On the other hand, if you are cheerful and helpful to your local administrators, who after all are subject to harassment in their turn, you may find them helpful when you want, for example, to visit a coastal state at short notice and thereby be able to get your permits in a week or ten days instead of having to wait months.

Inside every office the tension will be high. Those seeking promotion, or mere survival in their jobs, will increasingly tend to use every form of intimidation and blackmail against anyone they believe is a threat to them, including denunciation on charges of anti-Soviet agitation, which will lead to swift arrest. We can only advise you to keep a low profile and to control your natural instinct to express your own feelings and opinions. You will be able to console yourself by the frequent disappearance into labor camps of those who gained promotions only to find themselves denounced by even more devoted toadies of the regime.

Though the government apparatus will undergo a great expansion, all the key posts will be taken over by trusted supporters of the Soviets. However, there will be a transition period when the number of people with suitable training will be inadequate, and for a time, numbers of old civil servants will keep their jobs, although many will be purged, and those judged least politically reliable will be demoted or passed over for promotion. In the economic departments all who hold non-Marxist economic ideas will be removed. Salaries at the senior level will be high, with many perquisites such as cars, apartments, and so on; but the lower grades will suffer a sharp decline in real income. Moreover, although many buildings that have been abandoned by or seized from business firms will have been taken over, the expansion will be too great to cope with except by an increase in the numbers of people sharing an office. This should rise to between three and four times as many as now. Privacy is always one of the rarest commodities in a Communist dispensation. There will be a corresponding deterioration in office equipment. Nevertheless, government employ will be the only alternative for many persons who previously owned their own store or business concern or who were employed in one of the now-extinct enterprises.

There is something to be said, in fact, for seeking a job in one of the main offices dealing with the controls, permissions, and documentation now demanded on an ever-increasing scale. In such surroundings, it is easier to remain anonymous and to draw the minimum of attention to oneself—always an important consideration. On the other hand, a post in a small town, where there might be more opportunities for establishing relationships with those involved in the supplies of food and other necessities, has its points; moreover, it will always be advantageous to live where you do not need transport other than a bicycle to get to work. In the cities, where your home may be far from your job, the absence of private cars and the enormous overcrowding and erratic nature of public transport will make your morning and evening commuting a daily nightmare.

One problem that will particularly trouble you, especially during the initial period of disorganization, will be crime. Looters and muggers will have a field day. Because of the presence of the militia and the army patrols, you will not dare to carry anything that during a search might be construed as a weapon; but you and your family ought to make yourselves acquainted with at least the basic rules of unarmed combat in order to be able to defend yourselves against an attack by someone wielding a club, knife, or blackjack. In a fairly short time, however, the situation will ease. Muggers will disappear from the principal thoroughfares, and looters will be shot on the spot. The police will have full authority to fire on suspects however young, and there will be no public or other enquiries afterward.

However, once the immediate postoccupation crime wave has been put down, the authorities will cease to take much notice of nonpolitical crime. Occasional big round-ups of all known criminals will put down particularly overt waves of crime, and those caught will be shipped off to labor camps to serve, as we have seen, as sub-bosses over the much more numerous “politicals.”

But the police will be very busy, not only in all the many aspects of watching the citizens’ loyalties, but also in a wide variety of administrative tasks such as issuing “internal passports.” stamping them, registering all visitors to the particular town, issuing licenses for every sort of activity, and so on.

Soon a new criminal element will spring up. Many will be teenagers. Within a year or two America will have a well-developed caste of “hooligans.” Some will be the veteran survivors of present teenage gangs who have neither been shot nor been incorporated into the “militia” of the new order. Many will be children and young adolescents, thrown into the streets upon the death or arrest of their parents, who will roam the towns and the countryside and commit savage crimes. As for the young thugs who have been taken on by the regime, you may even recognize them, if only from old newspaper photographs, as you see them in uniform, accosting and arresting you, and asking bribes for your release. Experience shows, moreover, that many such criminals become well adjusted to their work and are soon indistinguishable from their more ideological comrades. Several common criminals rose high in Soviet and Eastern European police organizations; one, E. G. Evdokimov, even becoming a member of the Party’s Central Committee.

Organized crime in the form of the Mafia will be put down firmly; although any important member of the Mafia who shows any political sophistication ought to find it possible to arrange to be recruited into the regime’s administrative machine. Official histories of Communist movements relate that even “bandit” groups were incorporated into the Party machinery, with the original leaders usually, but not always, being purged later. Such an arrangement would be of great help to an occupation force without much of a base in the country, although the Mafiosi concerned would have to undertake to abandon crime except for actions on behalf of the Communist authorities.

Major crime rings that are nowadays unbreakable because of American legal provisions will not survive. But small-time crooks will seize the opportunities for bribery and fixing and acting as shady go-betweens offered by endless regulations and ill-paid bureaucrats. Soon, some will hardly be regarded as crooks at all by a population in desperate need of coping with the endless demands of officialdom. In fact, they will be treated almost as public benefactors. From time to time their actions will result in mass trials of fixers, crooks, and officials, leading in some cases to executions in the hope of a deterrent effect although without much long-term success.

So much for life as you will see it in your hometown. There will be many, in the uranium mines and elsewhere, who would return to it with joy. But what of the general prospects? At least, you may feel: “Better Red than dead.” Things will not turn out to be so simple, and you and your fellow citizens will not henceforth escape, as you had hoped, the horrors of war. As we have noted, the draft will be reinstituted, and young men will be called upon to serve a stint of two to three years in the “peacetime” American People’s Army. However, it is not likely that peace will prevail, and older men, if necessary to the age of forty and beyond, will also become liable for call-up, particularly in the event that China has not yet been attacked or that China has been attacked but is still carrying on a major guerrilla resistance. In that case, Moscow will be in great need of manpower. And, logically enough, Soviet aims will be best served by leaving Soviet troops to hold America and sending American young men, and the young of other Soviet satellites, to the war zone— under strict Soviet control, just as, at present, Cubans and East Germans are being used in Africa. In addition, if Chinese nuclear development has proceeded as projected, we may expect fusion bomb strikes on prime Soviet targets in America. In that case, America will not have avoided nuclear war by its surrender. But, in any case, such wars will become commonplace in the inevitable splits and schisms that will beset a communized, or largely communized, world.

If Chinese and other resistance is protracted, the Soviet army will be stretched so thin that the American People’s Army may also find itself committed against local patriots in the jungles of Africa and South America. All the same, it is even more likely that they will be sent to reinforce the pro-Soviet Vietnamese Communists as they fight the Chinese on the Mekong. Thus the war objectors of the late sixties may after all find themselves in Southeast Asia as the elderly conscripts of the early nineties.

Even a world effectively conquered by the USSR would be, as we said, beset by an endless cycle of schisms and rebellions, fought with the utmost ruthlessness and with every available modern weapon. As early as 1944, Milovan Djilas, who was then a leading Yugoslav Communist, was told by a Soviet general that “when Communism has triumphed throughout the entire world, then warfare will take on an ultimate bitterness.” We know that Stalin and the Communist chieftains of Eastern Europe planned an assault on Communist Yugoslavia itself, abandoned only because of their then overriding fear of the West. In Hungary in 1956, the first open clash came between two Communist-headed governments (together with a barely averted war between the USSR and Poland). In 1968, Communist Russia invaded Communist Czechoslovakia; and in the following year, full-scale battles between Communist Russia and Communist China were in progress on the Ussuri River, with all-out nuclear war a near thing. In 1978, the war between Communist Vietnam and Communist Cambodia occurred; and later the fighting between Vietnam and China. As the Soviet general told Djilas, eventually the proliferating sects and factions of communism “will undertake the reckless destruction of the human race in the name of the human race’s greater ‘happiness.’” You can be Red and dead!

The Soviet authorities, as they do in Russia today, will institute the most comprehensive and compulsory civil-defense programs. All civilians will be made to take part in regular drills and exercises. You will find these tedious and exhausting after your day’s work; but pay attention to them, and take them seriously. These are not theoretical undertakings.

Whether you are a soldier or a civilian, in the army or out of it, you will not be allowed, any more than the inhabitants of the Soviet Union are, to move about freely. Restrictions on travel are a fundamental component of Communist life. As in Russia, it will not be easy to obtain leave to move from one city to another or to relocate. You will be issued an identity card or “internal passport” that you will be required to carry at all times. It will contain your photograph and extensive personal data and will consist of several pages to provide room to stamp in the details of all your movements. (As we have seen, the whole working population will also be handed individual “labor books,” again with multiple pages, as your working record, including notes of any fines, warnings, admonishments, or disciplinary action taken against you. It will record each change of job, and when each book is filled up, it will be forwarded to the official archives before the issuing of a new one.)

If you are given permission to visit a strange town, particulars will be entered in your internal passport, and they will be noted by hotel receptionists or apartment-block caretakers for transmission to the local police station. Most readers will know already that in Communist countries all the rooms in the larger hotels are bugged and that major visitors are directed to such hotels. If you are a reasonably obscure personage, you should therefore avoid the big hotels and not only for economic reasons. In the smaller and cheaper ones, even the secret police do not have the resources for such action.

In Communist countries, and in America after the defeat, you will not expect your hotel, particularly one of the less expensive ones, to come up to the prewar American standard, and there are some items that you ought to get used to carrying with you if you are able to travel. These will include a tablet of soap, a clean towel, and a supply of toilet paper or the cut-up pieces of newspaper that for some time will do universal duty as toilet paper. Even the better hotels in Communist countries have had the plugs for the baths and basins stolen, so you might also take with you a couple of plugs of assorted sizes. An extra blanket and a tin of flea powder might also come in handy. In the hotels, as in most public buildings, you will not expect to find the elevators working, so be prepared to climb the stairs.

Your sense of isolation and depression in a strange town will be even greater than it is in your own, where at least you have your friends and your family and know your way around. In a strange town you will find the restaurants and places of amusement even drearier than at home.

If you do decide to leave your dismal room and go in search of whatever entertainment there might be, you could conceivably visit one of the local cinemas. The fare will be familiar. In the main feature, battalions of jolly Communists with shining faces, led by wise and stalwart Party members, may be shown ardently fulfilling the latest Five-Year Plan. You won’t find it enthralling, and you will feel uncomfortable sitting in the cinema practically alone, except for some young couples busy necking and some old people soundly snoozing. In any event, in the early days, the curfew will begin at eight or nine o’clock, so once you have swallowed your watery stew and acorn coffee in the State cafeteria, it will hardly be worth your while to wander further abroad.

In your gloomy room, you can switch on the television if any, or the radio. Most of the programs will consist of primitive propaganda of the type you avoided by not going to the cinema.

Or you may be able to watch a game of football between two factory teams or between teams of the American People’s Army, the Secret Police, and other state bodies, in which at least the usual doses of propaganda will only be injected during the breaks in the action, when you can turn the sound down while waiting for play to recommence.

Perhaps during halftime you may glance through the newspaper, The New York Red Times or the Washington Truth. You won’t bother with the political pages, devoted to turgid and predictable analysis, falsified statistics, and verbatim reports of the latest bloated speeches by Party leaders; but you will probably turn directly to the end of the paper, to the small section containing the daily chess problem or the crossword puzzle (if such a frivolity is allowed), and you might check the stub of your ticket in the State lottery against the list of winners. The State takes the bulk of the money, and the winners receive only fairly small awards, but even that would be a welcome addition to one’s budget and scanning the list does at least give you something to look forward to.

You might, of course, simply choose to go straight to bed and huddle up under that extra blanket you brought with you. You will not have dared to bring with you any of the pre-Occupation books, or “underground” typescript literature you may have at home. Nor, unless you are a fervid supporter of the Party, will you have weighed down your baggage with one of the ponderous, ill-printed social realist novels that are published by the millions but that only devotees of boredom ever bother to open. However, you can probably solace yourself (unless the management is saving power by an early turning off of the lights at the main switch), with a volume by some classical author that, though it may have been somewhat expurgated, is deemed to have redeeming social value.

Pleasant dreams.