What to Do When the Russians Come

IT IS POSSIBLE, if not very probable, that you are visiting your strange city in connection with one or another of the resistance activities that have sprung up and that are always flaring up more or less sporadically thereafter.

There is no point in being starry-eyed about the scope and possibilities of the American Resistance. What happened in World War II and in the forty years afterward, both with regard to resistance and counterresistance techniques, is not a reliable guide. If resistance methods have grown more sophisticated, so have the means of combating them. It will be a long struggle. Resistance groups will rise and will be wiped out. It would be foolish to expect that the attainment of American liberation is likely to take less than a generation or two. The resistance group with which you perhaps cast your lot will in all probability be merely one of a myriad of bright bubbles that the Russians will burst.

You, in your lonely room, are likely to be doing some small but invaluable service like carrying a message between illegal urban groups. But, in the early years, there will still be patriot partisans, like the Swamp Fox, Francis Marion, in mountains and forests, and you might be a courier, or scout, for these. One of us has some experience with partisans, and we venture some advice in this field.

The Partisan

Partisans can consist of as few as five people or as many as five hundred; obviously, the larger they become, the more they lose their irregular characteristics and take on the appearance of routine military formations.

In the early years of Soviet rule, there will be a great many bands of partisans, major and minor, prowling the vast back-country of the United States and Canada. At first sight, North America is ideally suited to partisan activity. Partisans will take to the forests of Colorado, Oregon, and Washington; to the mountains of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho; to the canyons of Arizona and New Mexico; to the marshes and bayous of Louisiana and Florida.

There are an estimated nine million handguns and rifles in the possession of individual Americans. Many of their owners belong to gun clubs and know how to use them. The people who vanish into the wilderness soon after the surrender will have taken care to raid their local clubs’ caches and the armories of the National Guard in order to carry off a mass of weapons and ammunition. Wherever possible, they will have raided their nearby military barracks and navy and air force installations, where these have survived or are uncontaminated by atomic attack, and will have acquired trucks, jeeps, half-tracks, and as much sophisticated combat material such as antitank missiles, mines, and grenades as they can load up and cart away.

The worst problem faced by the modern partisan, as in Afghanistan, is the armored helicopter gunship. These can be brought down without sophisticated SAMs; but small arms are not very effective, and heavier, though simple, rifle-type weapons work well. These will not be readily available, and military commanders should divert supplies while this is still possible.

The American partisans will be tough and vigorous people who will know the territory where they operate like the back of their hand. They will know how to make themselves scarce in it and the best places to hide the stuff that they steal. They will know every road and path and track. They will be ranchers or farmers or people from small- or medium-sized towns who are experienced hunters and fishermen. They will be able to ride a horse and repair any sort of machine. A few will have owned their own aircraft. Above all, many will come directly from the armed forces.

They will be resourceful and physically fit. Some of them, who have seen the war coming and will be aware of the need for knowledgeable leadership, will have specially hardened themselves by means of additional climbing, hiking, camping, trekking, and orienteering. They will have mapped out the best ski trails, particularly those that can be traversed at night. The more provident will even have made special trips to the larger libraries to seek out and make photocopies of the more important books and articles on irregular warfare such as Mao Tse-tung’s Primer of Guerrilla War or General Alberto Bayo Giroud’s 150 Questions for a Guerrilla. As we have said, part of this material will be out-of-date, but it will still contain a tip or two that might save your life in an ugly situation.

It will be a temptation to band together into sizable groups. This will be a natural instinct, especially after the shock of an overwhelming defeat.

Yet a band of even fifteen or twenty partisans already begins to pose serious administrative problems. Larger units are only desirable when the circumstances are such that the enemy troops are tied down elsewhere and cannot concentrate against you. But, even when it is feasible to have larger units, do not attack regular Soviet troops unless you have an overwhelming advantage. Even more important than an advantage of numbers or position, never forget the advantage of speed. Have your operation finished before the Russians can call up an air strike or ground reinforcements. By such tactics, Afghans armed with rifles and grenades have destroyed tank detachments. The threat of such action has meant that even when superior Russian force makes a valley untenable, the Russians have nevertheless withdrawn after laying it waste for fear of attacks on their supply columns.

Indeed, the Afghans have shown that determined guerrillas in suitable country can effectively fight the enemy to a standstill. All the same, do not forget that the Afghans have certain advantages. They still have an open frontier to the south and are able both to evacuate their noncombatants and to receive a certain amount of supplies from abroad. These advantages are unlikely to be available to an American partisan force. Then again, the Afghans are trained from childhood for guerrilla fighting. They are ready for it both in the sense that they know their mountains from a scout or sniper’s point of view, and they are expert in the weapons of the lone fighter; but also, they are psychologically ready for such a war when it comes. The answer for Americans must be that they are quick learners. At first, they will make mistakes and suffer disasters. After a while, the survivors will have had the experience for which nothing else is a substitute.

You will pick your targets with the greatest care. As far as possible, limit yourself to those related directly to the Russians. You will not help your fellow citizens if you make their already uncomfortable lives even more uncomfortable by destroying the power stations, dams, and other facilities on which they rely. If, for military or political reasons, it nevertheless seems necessary to carry out such actions, let the population know your reasons.

Never forget that they are liable to the most savage reprisals. Hostages will be taken and shot. You will have to judge the merits of an operation against the horrors that are bound to result. It will astonish you, at first, how remorselessly the Russians will behave—not only toward yourself, but toward your families, toward anyone brave enough to help you, and also toward the populace at large. They have always done so, and now there will be little or no world opinion to influence what is going on. The Russians can act as they like: that is to say, as they acted in Lithuania and the Western Ukraine and as they are now acting in Afghanistan, or worse. Their ultimate argument was, and remains, the tank and the firing squad.

Nevertheless, even in cases where the prospects are poor, where the Russians can hunt you down in your forests, starve you out in your swamps, and bottle you up in your canyons, you will remember that elsewhere groups are holding out, fighting back; that you are part of a great national effort.

You will have advantages over your comrades in the cities. You will be able to operate your radios fairly freely; you might possibly be able to arrange for supplies to be smuggled in from abroad. Yet yours will not be an easy lot. The vast landscape in which you feel at home will sometimes seem to have turned into a prison. You will become more and more hardened physically and psychologically; yet your strength will also be sapped by the climate, whether hot or cold, wet or dry. You will have difficulties with food supplies. The winters will be hard.

All the same, hold out. Do not at any time be tempted to parley with the Russians under a flag of truce. In 1945, the Polish underground leaders contacted the Russians. They were guaranteed safe-conduct but were immediately arrested and later tried and sentenced for anti-Soviet activity. In 1956, the Hungarian minister of war was induced to attend talks with the Red Army commander in Hungary. He too was arrested, tried, and hanged. American partisan chiefs are likely to get an even shorter shrift, so do not weaken. It seems a more enviable fate to die fighting on Pike’s Peak than in a cellar in Pittsburgh.

Partisans, generally speaking, cannot hold out forever unless they are aided from outside. Nevertheless, it has often taken a number of years even for the Communists, totally uninhibited as to methods, to destroy guerrilla movements even in comparatively small areas. The Lithuanian partisan struggle, in a small, well-forested but nonmountainous territory, was not abandoned till eight years had gone by. The same applies to the western Ukrainian partisans, in the more mountainous regions of the north Carpathians. In the larger territories of America, a longer struggle could probably be sustained, even though we may set against this the advantages of new Russian equipment.

It may be improbable that the Soviet system could be shaken to the point of collapse in so short a period. But nothing is impossible, and in the case of mass risings throughout the Soviet empire, American partisans could play a big part. In the more likely event that partisan warfare becomes ineffective long before the Soviet grip is shaken, it may be better for the partisan command to make a conscious decision to demobilize their surviving fighters, providing them with false papers and cover stories and fitting them into properly chosen backgrounds—as in both Lithuania and the Ukraine.

By that time, survivors would be few. If you are among them, you will act out the life of a loyal Soviet-American citizen and await your time. It may not come in your lifetime, but you can go to your grave with a clear conscience.

Good luck!

In the cities, and other areas easier to control than the mountains and forests, armed resistance will be difficult. For a few months, “urban guerrillas” in very small groups may succeed in carrying out sporadic acts of assassination and sabotage against the occupiers. But such groups have never succeeded in maintaining themselves for long in Communist-occupied countries. It may be that, in the special circumstances of America, such groups will last longer. But in a comparatively short time, at any rate, the complete ruthlessness of Communist secret police methods, involving in each case the probable arrest and torture of hundreds of people who might conceivably know anything, will probably have its effect. The illegal possession of a weapon will, in itself, in the early stages, carry the death penalty and, even later, will always involve sentencing to a labor camp even in the absence of any suspicion of rebellious intent.

Nevertheless, there will be Americans who feel impelled to strike back in this way. And, in spite of the disadvantages, some good results may yet be attained. Our advice is: Do not waste your efforts. A single, really massive act of sabotage against a carefully picked secret police or military target may be worthwhile; wrecking the odd train will not. The assassination of local, and if possible, of more important Quislings is also worthwhile, both in cheering the population and frightening the rulers.

After a few years, though, armed resistance in the cities on any organized basis will be virtually extinct. The resentments of the American people will not.

In fact, in all the countries that have come under Soviet occupation, the population has never become reconciled to the regime. The rulers have maintained support only from that small caste that has done well in terms of power and privilege and from a limited gang of indoctrinated young thugs. The sheer pervasiveness and ruthlessness of the secret police and the whole power apparatus is enormous. But only armed force, including the Soviet army itself and the prospect not merely of defeat but of greatly intensified military terror, has kept the people down.

Even so, time after time, whole populations have come together in great movements of resistance and rebellion that have at least temporarily thrown off the Soviet yoke.

Among Americans, with their special attachment to the principles of liberty, their special horror of foreign rule, you may expect that Communist control will never even begin to strike serious roots. People will be cowed, baffled, disorganized. Some may even hope to work “within” the new system and turn it in a more acceptable direction. But the invariable experience has been that Communist policies increasingly antagonize every section of the population—including major sections of the Party itself, who see that they cannot rule indefinitely on such a basis.

Even in democracies, governments become unpopular. And they would become even more unpopular if they stayed in power, even without terror, for a decade or decades. How much more is this true of an unpopular foreign-sponsored clique, bound by its principles to ever more hated and unsuccessful policies. A poll taken in Czechoslovakia at the end of 1967 showed that the then leaders of the Party and State had the support of 1 percent of the population.

The situation that will thus be established, throughout the Soviet empire, is that of a population faced with a political and military machinery developed over many years for the purpose of holding down resentment and preventing its expression. And of crushing it if, in spite of everything, it turns into full rebellion.

Yet as the years go by, you will sooner or later find yourself swept up in a mass movement against the occupier. These movements are very often started in the cities, in the form of strikes and demonstrations by the industrial workers (see p. 95). With no trade union rights, yet thrown closely together by the nature of their work, they are the first to be able to make some united protest at a reduction in the rations (or mere absence of necessary foods in the market), at deteriorating housing conditions, or sudden cuts in piece-rates—all of which have always, sooner or later, appeared in cities under Communist regimes. This is not, of course, the only way in which pent-up resentments will be released; some gross offense to national pride has also been the last straw in bringing people out onto the streets. In any case, after years of repression, during which you may have felt that no one else thought as you did, it will be immensely refreshing to find the bulk of the population coming together as comrades in a struggle.

It will be particularly encouraging to note that the young, right down to school children, whom you feared might have been indoctrinated and lost to their country, are the most active and aggressive.

In the beginning, there will be little question of armed uprising. The few weapons secreted here and there will be no match for the machine guns and cannon of the police and soldiers. It will be a matter of furious but unarmed demonstrations, run by spontaneously formed and secret committees, that will march with various demands on Party headquarters and the local government buildings.

The authorities will find that units of the Sovietized “U.S. Army” will refuse to fire on their compatriots. Secret police and eventually Soviet army formations will, perhaps not until your town has been in your own hands for some days, put down the crowds with machine-gun fire. Losses in your town at this stage may not be very great—probably only a few hundred dead. If, as is probable, you survive as “order” is being restored, you will face something similar to the problems of the very first phase of the Occupation.

If the resentment thus boils up spontaneously in a single city, the regime will probably find it possible to isolate it. In this case, it will be comparatively easy to crush the movement. Nevertheless, it will prove worthwhile. The rulers’ morale will have been shaken. The American people, even if not at once, will learn of your exploit. One more hand will have taken up, and will be passing on, the torch of liberty.

In other circumstances, the movement may spread from city to city before it can be stopped, till a mass rising of the American people faces the Communists in Washington.

All the advantages will still be on the side of a well-armed, well-organized military force. All the same, the mere numbers of the insurgents, their ability, with luck, to halt essential supplies to the occupier, the coming over to them of portions of the puppet “U.S. Army,” will present the Russians with a formidable threat. Even so, the chances are heavily against you. If the United States, well equipped with modern arms, was unable to defeat the Soviets, it will be even more difficult now. Although they may have a period of indecision (when they hope that the movement can be headed off), when they act, it will be with complete ruthlessness, and all weapons deemed necessary will be employed.

Casualties will be heavy, and the immediate reprisals heavier still. But they will not be able to deal with everyone who has opposed them since that will involve almost the entire population. In similar circumstances, even quite prominent resisters have escaped the net.

And there will be advantages. First, the whole Communist network will have been shaken and virtually destroyed; the building of a new Party on the discredited ruins of the old will be no easy business. Second, the Russians will wish to ease the tensions and return things to something similar to Soviet-style “normality” as soon as they can. To this end, they will, after the first wave of terror, withdraw the most ruthless and hated of their American servants and replace them with men of more moderate appearance. Economic policies that have driven the population to desperate acts will be to some extent relaxed.

But above all, the American people will once more be morally invigorated. Over the years that follow, it will look as if, once again, apathy and adaptation have set in; but the example will not really be forgotten. Sooner or later, perhaps not in your own lifetime, the Soviets will be faced by a national rebellion at a time when their grip on the rest of their empire is being shaken, and their internal policies have brought the Soviet Union itself to catastrophe.