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 ha
ve 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.
What to Do When the Russians Come Page 10
