What to Do When the Russians Come Page 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. THE INDIVIDUAL BY PROFESSION, OPINION, AND HABIT

  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.

  Automob
ile 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