Robert Conquest - What to Do When the Russians Come

Duplicating machines will be usable by designated staff only, and will be available, even to this degree, only in major libraries.

Prospects minimal. Emigrate or die.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.