What to Do When the Russians Come Read online

  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.