Organized crime in the form of the Mafia will be put down firmly; although any important member of the Mafia who shows any political sophistication ought to find it possible to arrange to be recruited into the regime’s administrative machine. Official histories of Communist movements relate that even “bandit” groups were incorporated into the Party machinery, with the original leaders usually, but not always, being purged later. Such an arrangement would be of great help to an occupation force without much of a base in the country, although the Mafiosi concerned would have to undertake to abandon crime except for actions on behalf of the Communist authorities.
Major crime rings that are nowadays unbreakable because of American legal provisions will not survive. But small-time crooks will seize the opportunities for bribery and fixing and acting as shady go-betweens offered by endless regulations and ill-paid bureaucrats. Soon, some will hardly be regarded as crooks at all by a population in desperate need of coping with the endless demands of officialdom. In fact, they will be treated almost as public benefactors. From time to time their actions will result in mass trials of fixers, crooks, and officials, leading in some cases to executions in the hope of a deterrent effect although without much long-term success.
So much for life as you will see it in your hometown. There will be many, in the uranium mines and elsewhere, who would return to it with joy. But what of the general prospects? At least, you may feel: “Better Red than dead.” Things will not turn out to be so simple, and you and your fellow citizens will not henceforth escape, as you had hoped, the horrors of war. As we have noted, the draft will be reinstituted, and young men will be called upon to serve a stint of two to three years in the “peacetime” American People’s Army. However, it is not likely that peace will prevail, and older men, if necessary to the age of forty and beyond, will also become liable for call-up, particularly in the event that China has not yet been attacked or that China has been attacked but is still carrying on a major guerrilla resistance. In that case, Moscow will be in great need of manpower. And, logically enough, Soviet aims will be best served by leaving Soviet troops to hold America and sending American young men, and the young of other Soviet satellites, to the war zone— under strict Soviet control, just as, at present, Cubans and East Germans are being used in Africa. In addition, if Chinese nuclear development has proceeded as projected, we may expect fusion bomb strikes on prime Soviet targets in America. In that case, America will not have avoided nuclear war by its surrender. But, in any case, such wars will become commonplace in the inevitable splits and schisms that will beset a communized, or largely communized, world.
If Chinese and other resistance is protracted, the Soviet army will be stretched so thin that the American People’s Army may also find itself committed against local patriots in the jungles of Africa and South America. All the same, it is even more likely that they will be sent to reinforce the pro-Soviet Vietnamese Communists as they fight the Chinese on the Mekong. Thus the war objectors of the late sixties may after all find themselves in Southeast Asia as the elderly conscripts of the early nineties.
Even a world effectively conquered by the USSR would be, as we said, beset by an endless cycle of schisms and rebellions, fought with the utmost ruthlessness and with every available modern weapon. As early as 1944, Milovan Djilas, who was then a leading Yugoslav Communist, was told by a Soviet general that “when Communism has triumphed throughout the entire world, then warfare will take on an ultimate bitterness.” We know that Stalin and the Communist chieftains of Eastern Europe planned an assault on Communist Yugoslavia itself, abandoned only because of their then overriding fear of the West. In Hungary in 1956, the first open clash came between two Communist-headed governments (together with a barely averted war between the USSR and Poland). In 1968, Communist Russia invaded Communist Czechoslovakia; and in the following year, full-scale battles between Communist Russia and Communist China were in progress on the Ussuri River, with all-out nuclear war a near thing. In 1978, the war between Communist Vietnam and Communist Cambodia occurred; and later the fighting between Vietnam and China. As the Soviet general told Djilas, eventually the proliferating sects and factions of communism “will undertake the reckless destruction of the human race in the name of the human race’s greater ‘happiness.’” You can be Red and dead!
The Soviet authorities, as they do in Russia today, will institute the most comprehensive and compulsory civil-defense programs. All civilians will be made to take part in regular drills and exercises. You will find these tedious and exhausting after your day’s work; but pay attention to them, and take them seriously. These are not theoretical undertakings.
Whether you are a soldier or a civilian, in the army or out of it, you will not be allowed, any more than the inhabitants of the Soviet Union are, to move about freely. Restrictions on travel are a fundamental component of Communist life. As in Russia, it will not be easy to obtain leave to move from one city to another or to relocate. You will be issued an identity card or “internal passport” that you will be required to carry at all times. It will contain your photograph and extensive personal data and will consist of several pages to provide room to stamp in the details of all your movements. (As we have seen, the whole working population will also be handed individual “labor books,” again with multiple pages, as your working record, including notes of any fines, warnings, admonishments, or disciplinary action taken against you. It will record each change of job, and when each book is filled up, it will be forwarded to the official archives before the issuing of a new one.)
If you are given permission to visit a strange town, particulars will be entered in your internal passport, and they will be noted by hotel receptionists or apartment-block caretakers for transmission to the local police station. Most readers will know already that in Communist countries all the rooms in the larger hotels are bugged and that major visitors are directed to such hotels. If you are a reasonably obscure personage, you should therefore avoid the big hotels and not only for economic reasons. In the smaller and cheaper ones, even the secret police do not have the resources for such action.
In Communist countries, and in America after the defeat, you will not expect your hotel, particularly one of the less expensive ones, to come up to the prewar American standard, and there are some items that you ought to get used to carrying with you if you are able to travel. These will include a tablet of soap, a clean towel, and a supply of toilet paper or the cut-up pieces of newspaper that for some time will do universal duty as toilet paper. Even the better hotels in Communist countries have had the plugs for the baths and basins stolen, so you might also take with you a couple of plugs of assorted sizes. An extra blanket and a tin of flea powder might also come in handy. In the hotels, as in most public buildings, you will not expect to find the elevators working, so be prepared to climb the stairs.
Your sense of isolation and depression in a strange town will be even greater than it is in your own, where at least you have your friends and your family and know your way around. In a strange town you will find the restaurants and places of amusement even drearier than at home.
If you do decide to leave your dismal room and go in search of whatever entertainment there might be, you could conceivably visit one of the local cinemas. The fare will be familiar. In the main feature, battalions of jolly Communists with shining faces, led by wise and stalwart Party members, may be shown ardently fulfilling the latest Five-Year Plan. You won’t find it enthralling, and you will feel uncomfortable sitting in the cinema practically alone, except for some young couples busy necking and some old people soundly snoozing. In any event, in the early days, the curfew will begin at eight or nine o’clock, so once you have swallowed your watery stew and acorn coffee in the State cafeteria, it will hardly be worth your while to wander further abroad.
In your gloomy room, you can switch on the television if any, or the radio. Most of the programs will consist of primitive propaganda of the type you avoided by not goin
g to the cinema.
Or you may be able to watch a game of football between two factory teams or between teams of the American People’s Army, the Secret Police, and other state bodies, in which at least the usual doses of propaganda will only be injected during the breaks in the action, when you can turn the sound down while waiting for play to recommence.
Perhaps during halftime you may glance through the newspaper, The New York Red Times or the Washington Truth. You won’t bother with the political pages, devoted to turgid and predictable analysis, falsified statistics, and verbatim reports of the latest bloated speeches by Party leaders; but you will probably turn directly to the end of the paper, to the small section containing the daily chess problem or the crossword puzzle (if such a frivolity is allowed), and you might check the stub of your ticket in the State lottery against the list of winners. The State takes the bulk of the money, and the winners receive only fairly small awards, but even that would be a welcome addition to one’s budget and scanning the list does at least give you something to look forward to.
You might, of course, simply choose to go straight to bed and huddle up under that extra blanket you brought with you. You will not have dared to bring with you any of the pre-Occupation books, or “underground” typescript literature you may have at home. Nor, unless you are a fervid supporter of the Party, will you have weighed down your baggage with one of the ponderous, ill-printed social realist novels that are published by the millions but that only devotees of boredom ever bother to open. However, you can probably solace yourself (unless the management is saving power by an early turning off of the lights at the main switch), with a volume by some classical author that, though it may have been somewhat expurgated, is deemed to have redeeming social value.
Pleasant dreams.
7. RESISTANCE
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 mor
e 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.
What to Do When the Russians Come Page 13
