The prices you will have to charge will probably be beyond the pockets of most citizens, although there will always be a quota of minor officials, police, and so on who will prefer to eat anything and to eat anywhere in preference to their own dreary canteens.
Many cooks and waiters will find that they have no choice left but to work in such canteens, where conditions are notoriously poor, hours indeterminate, and pay minimal. However, wretched though working in State canteens may be, it possesses one advantage not to be despised: access to food. Employees will always be suspected of stealing, and suspected correctly, but the Soviet habit is not to try to enforce the unenforceable in such spheres unless they have some other reason for getting rid of somebody—or unless instructions for a strict purge have come down and they are looking for easily compromised victims.
Eventually the whole restaurant network will be run by the Department of Internal Trade, and quality will suffer accordingly, though restaurateurs who manage to work in them will, as we say, at least eat.
Russian American
Though some will be used by the occupiers as interpreters, and even in political posts, Americans of Russian descent can look forward to especially virulent treatment. We will draw a veil over what will happen to former Russian defectors who fall into Soviet hands.
Sadist
Although the secret police will have some use for torturers, such positions are unlikely to be open except to men with political acumen and training, but low-grade thugs, known as “boxers,” are often employed for routine beatings. Guards will be needed, of course, on a large scale for the new labor camp and prison system and will be more or less free to maltreat prisoners at their leisure. You should be warned, on the other hand, that most of the labor camps are likely to be situated in the most distant and forbidding parts of the continent.
If you apply for a post as an executioner, you might be enrolled in one of the municipal firing squads. Your opportunity to carry out individual executions, if such is your taste, will probably be somewhat restricted. The traditional Soviet method of executing single offenders is by means of a bullet in the back of the neck and is invariably conducted neatly and expeditiously by a specialist of officer rank. Mass executions are bound, of course, to occur, and you may well be given a chance to participate in some of them.
Schoolteacher
Under Academic we have dealt with the situation of the university teacher. In preuniversity education, teachers will find that things are, generally speaking, similar. Instruction in mathematics will continue much as before, but most other subjects will have new textbooks and new curricula. Many texts in English literature will be withdrawn, and there will be an emphasis on Soviet and Communist authors of the social realist persuasion, most of whose works will have the texture of sawdust.
You too will have to teach your pupils versions of history that are entirely untrue. You too will have to lead them in ceremonies of loyalty to the regime. You will spend hours on teachers’ committees in which ways of improving the political education of the children is discussed. But, except in the highest classes, you will not have to teach “Marxism-Leninism” as such, merely a set of easily assimilated ideas, a sort of Communist pap or pabulum. You will find that the Party administrators in charge of you are a low-grade lot since the more educated ones will be spread thin in the universities and elsewhere. They will intervene in the clumsiest and most irritating manner. You must not retort in kind.
Be careful of the temptation, while teaching nonsense, to make your true view of it clear to your students by your tone of voice or the expression on your face. One Soviet instruction typical of many, runs:
One must not content oneself with merely paying attention to what is being said, for that may well be in complete harmony with the Party program. One must pay attention also to the manner—to the sincerity, for example, with which a schoolmistress recites a poem the authorities regard as doubtful, or the pleasure revealed by a critic who goes into detail about a play he professes to condemn.
Your position will bring you some particularly difficult problems. First, children are more easily influenced than older people, and you will find at least a few of your pupils beginning to believe what they are told day in and day out. You will be tempted to guide them unobtrusively toward the truth. If you do, be sure to be very careful indeed. Once children are persuaded that it is their duty to report you for deviation, it takes little to persuade them to denounce you. There are always smug, nasty-minded children with grudges against everybody, but especially teachers.
Second, you will also find the opposite problem: many children, especially the younger ones, may blurt out true facts or express their true feelings. You will wish to do all you can to protect them and to protect their families from whom they probably imbibed these “errors.” Yet you will have to tell them that they are wrong while making every excuse for them.
This will all be a very harrowing experience, and it is no wonder that teachers have been among the most severely purged professions in all Communist countries. After a while, if you keep your job, you will adjust as best you can. And you will find as time goes by that the children too have adjusted to the situation and no longer betray themselves. As for the minority whom you regretfully see passing from your hands as offensively loyal robots of the regime, do not worry too much. Some, indeed, will go on to become the new generation of Soviet auxiliaries. But many, even those who may be at their worst at sixteen, will become disillusioned as students or in early adulthood.
Military and civil-defense training will be compulsory in all schools, and you will be required to help where necessary.
Scientist
Certain sciences, such as astronomy, will be comparatively free from official intrusion, but most will be subject to State intervention. If you are a practicing scientist in any field particularly useful to the Soviet Union, you are likely to be deported there, although you will be handled more or less with kid gloves as you will be regarded in the same light as valuable livestock. Once in the Soviet Union, you will be housed in comfortable circumstances in special isolated communities, in the Urals or in Siberia. Provided you behave yourself and work hard, you will be well treated as long as your line of research proves fruitful.
Whether you work for the Russians in the USSR or the United States, you will encounter continuous trouble among your Party managers at all levels. Avoid getting involved in all such backbiting and squabbling and devote yourself, as far as possible, to your own concerns. You are, after all, purely as a scientist, likely to find your work absorbing, and it will help you to forget your troubles. You will find it disturbing and infuriating to be herded into mass projects, harangued by officials, and given timetables and deadlines; but as long as you toe the line, you will probably be able to continue with your own line of research, whatever it is, at least for part of the time, and you may be able to overlook the fact that whatever advances you help to bring about will be put to use to increase still further the powers of a tyrannical regime.
The sting may also be lessened by the sympathy of your Soviet colleagues, most of whom will be sensitive people who silently regard themselves as being in the same boat. Now that Soviet science has come of age, there is less likelihood than formerly that you will become trapped in one of the crasser controversies. Vavilov, the great biologist, fell foul of the quack Lysenko, whose theories were endorsed by Stalin, and he died in the Gulag. Stalin also espoused the peculiar theories of the linguist Marr, who claimed that all language derived from only four basic sounds, and many scholars fell foul of the dictator in consequence and wound up in jail. In modern circumstances, the probability of such bizarre episodes has lessened, but the Central Committee still has the last word in scientific matters. You should be alert and try not to get yourself entangled in controversy. Many scientists, mathematicians, and so on are now in jail or exile in the USSR for applying their reasoning powers to political and social matters. Do not despise the minor skills yo
u may have picked up, such as the ability to repair electrical equipment. If you are purged, this may be valuable even in a labor camp, while elsewhere it may provide you with an income.
Socialist
Socialists with ideas about socialism different from the definition of that form of society thought correct by the Soviet authorities will suffer earlier and more severely than mere democrats and capitalists. The leaders of the Eastern European Socialists are mostly dead or in prison, and all their parties have long since been extinguished.
But at first, for a time, the Russians will encourage a Socialist party. It will have as its leadership, if possible, a few prominent members of the present movement with the addition of a few secret Communists. All the smaller Socialist sects will probably be incorporated into it, as we said in an earlier chapter, at a conference run on “constitutional” lines. Those attending the conference will be rendered amenable both by simple, direct pressure and by the absence due to the arrest of those Socialists who have previously shown themselves strongly opposed to the Soviet system.
Within two to three years, any remaining Socialist leaders inclined to show any sign of independence will be eliminated, and the Socialists will be merged (once again “voluntarily”) with the Communist party. A very few Socialist leaders will be accorded positions in the new organization. These, of course, will be men who have already collaborated unreservedly. Even so, few of them will last long. Some will vanish into oblivion, others into the labor camps and prisons, as did the stooge Arpad Szakasits, who betrayed the Hungarian Social Democratic party to the Communists.
Student
You will not get to college if your parents have been classified as social or political undesirables. Children of working-class parents will in principle enjoy preference over middle-class parents, but in fact, the children of collaborators and Party functionaries will have priority, whatever their scholastic abilities. (And the employment by the Communist rich of teachers wishing to supplement their salaries by private tutoring will give them a certain advantage even there.) For ordinary students, as against the children of Party members, the entrance requirements will be stricter than they are now. The curriculum will be drab and examinations will be strenuous. Punctual and regular attendance in class will be obligatory, especially in the courses in Marxism-Leninism. Military and paramilitary training will take place, although this will be in addition to, not in place of, the normal two years of military service that will precede or follow the years at the university. Students will be expected to be polite, and their clothes and personal grooming will be in accord with the institutional dress code. The student leadership will be appointed by the Communist administration, and student protests, strikes, sit-ins, and other demonstrations will be promptly and unequivocally put down if they occur. Offenders will be dismissed from college and sent to jail. Students will also be liable to free and “voluntary” service to the State; for example, at the times of planting and harvesting you can be sent to work for ten hours a day and for a month or six weeks at a time, in the fields with the regular farm workers, picking potatoes, cabbages, beets, and other row crops. This will keep you physically fit but will interfere somewhat with your studies.
As the system settles down, a flourishing market in examination papers, professional examination sitters, and so on will arise. If, even so, you fail your examinations, it will often be possible to buy fake credentials. Influential parents will usually be able to obtain improved marks for their children through threats or bribes—a perennial scandal in the USSR today. (See also Youth.)
Surgeon (see Doctor)
Technician (see Engineer)
Television Station Owner or Employee (see Journalist)
Trade Unionist (see Industrial Worker)
Honest trade union leaders will be bustled off at once to the labor camps. Crooked ones, who can be expected to be familiar with the strong-arm tactics called for in the first days of the Occupation, will last longer. The smaller craft unions will be abolished and those that remain will be concentrated into large, streamlined corporations with all leading posts under direct Party and secret police control. Trade union conferences will rapidly become spectacles at which the decrees and policies of the Party will be ecstatically and unanimously rubber-stamped. This in fact will be the chief function of the trade unions: to facilitate the control, discipline, and unity of the workforce. Questions of pay and working conditions will be of secondary importance and will in practice be the concern of Party officials. To resist or question the decisions of the employer, who will now be the State, will bring you penalties.
The leaders of the Soviet Union are peculiarly sensitive, as the leaders of Communist America will be, to defiance by the workers since it represents the most alarming of the challenges that might be made to their supremacy and right to govern. According to Marxist-Leninist theory, such defiance should simply not occur, so it is very disturbing when it does, and the authorities will react sharply. You should take this into account before you decide to embark on strikes, slowdowns, pay disputes, and all similar overt forms of industrial action, let alone form any genuine union. Remember too that informers and agents provocateurs will be everywhere around you. Do not complain of the tedious factory meetings where you will be harangued by Party functionaries and try not to doze off during the sessions of Marxist-Leninist instruction that will become a regular feature of your working life.
But, as we have said (see Industrial Worker), your chance may come, and you may be able to form genuine works councils in times of crisis and even have them negotiate genuinely with the Communist authorities—although they will eventually be suppressed unless the whole regime is overthrown.
Traitor, Quisling
There will, of course, be many high posts available throughout the police, governmental, and economic machinery for any reasonably qualified traitors. If you are lacking in any qualification, you can work your way upward, say through the ranks of the Seksoti or secret collaborators of the secret police, and you might emerge in the course of time with a satisfactory job in one of those unobtrusive organizations of American nationals under Soviet direction concerned with the pursuit, identification, and betrayal of your fellow citizens.
Travel Agent or Travel Agency Employee
Travel agencies as constituted at present will be shut down, but employment for a certain number of the redundant operatives may become available in local government, supervising the schedules of the crowded trains and buses. Here the principle will be that the lower the level of service, the more bureaucrats will be required.
Trotskyite
In your case the prognosis is so grave that your only alternative to flight would seem to be to prepare to die.
University Teacher (see Academic)
Veterinarian
Not only will the keeping of domestic pets be virtually discontinued, but the general scarcity of funds will mean that the treatment of those that remain will be undertaken at home. We suggest that you equip yourself to specialize in the care of horses and farm animals. There will always be a demand for the latter, and horses will proliferate as cars grow scarcer. You will become a government servant, and a comparatively well-paid one; that is, at about an eighth of your present salary. You must take care at all times that blame for the death of badly managed collective farm cattle is not pinned on you. Above all, if you can, avoid tending horses under Soviet ownership. Many vets were shot for alleged poisoning of Red Army horses in the 1930s, and even if it does not come to that, you could very easily be victimized.
Worker (see Trade Unionist)
Writer
Writers will know better than most people what to expect from the Occupation as they are already well informed as to what happens to their co-writers behind the Iron Curtain and in other Communist countries. If you wish to become a rich, celebrated conformist, you should, of course, begin to familiarize yourself without delay with socialist realism. Cultivate those Communists and Sovietophiles who ar
e already prominent on the cultural scene and who will become your artistic commissars when the Russians arrive. Without their approval, your books are not going to be published, you will receive no literary prizes, and above all you will stand no chance of being included in any of the writers’ delegations that visit other countries. This will not matter if the delegations are going to other Communist countries, as that would afford you little relief from the tedium of the life to which you are already condemned—a tedium that is particularly hard, we might add, for a writer. But occasionally such delegations will visit any countries that have not already been subjugated by the Soviet Union, and then you will have a brief chance, in spite of the secret policeman attached to your group, to see what life is like beyond the prison walls. Take a good look at it; there may not be many such glimpses left.
If you are a real writer, and you can somehow manage to emigrate to a free country before the Soviet army takes over, you should probably make up your mind to go. It will not be an easy decision. You will be reluctant to cut yourself off from your own roots, from your people in their hour of agony, from the sources of your inspiration. It is worthwhile consoling yourself with the thought that many writers before you have chosen to live as exiles and that in many cases emigration has not only not damaged but has actually sharpened their perceptions and intensified their art. We put forward one fact that may help you to decide. In The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (1962), we find that the average age at death of those writers who went into exile after the Russian revolution was seventy-two, whereas the average age at death of those writers who chose to stay behind was forty-five. The higher life expectancy of the exiles was twenty-seven years. (See also Actor; Artist; Filmmaker; Musician.)
What to Do When the Russians Come Page 11
