Robert Conquest - What to Do When the Russians Come

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.

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 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.

In your case the prognosis is so grave that your only alternative to flight would seem to be to prepare to die.

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.

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 are 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 .)

You will find yourself under very heavy pressures of a type to which your present life has not accustomed you.

On the one hand, the Communist victors will hope above all to be able to harness the strength and spirit of the American young to their scheme of things. On the other, young people everywhere, although perhaps especially in America, have a tradition of nonconformity, rebellion against authority, a desire to think for themselves.

We would expect many American young people—especially those young enough not yet to have spouses or children—to throw themselves into the tens of thousands of spontaneous flare-ups of resistance that will mark the early days. Many will be killed, many captured and sent to labor camps. But there will be many survivors; some will join the partisans, and some will fade back into the background, having learned a bitter lesson.

To these latter, during the phase of consolidation of Communist power, we offer the same counsels of prudence we gave their elders. It will be much harder for the young and ardent to maintain the same restraints. You will make the effort. You will grow up, become tempered, and mature very quickly.

The special Communist effort to indoctrinate you will mean that you will be under considerably higher pressures than your elders. Membership of the Communist party itself will probably never be allowed to rise above a few million, and there will be no question of forcing adults, except in certain specialist posts, to join it. The Young Communist League, however, will number tens of millions, and for most jobs available to the young, and studentships at universities, joining will be almost unavoidable. This will mean that you will lose several hours a week at compulsory sessions in Marxism-Leninism, the Communist version of current events, and so forth, in addition to endless harangues about loyalty and the florious future, which you will be expected to applaud.

You will find that the youth leaders who serve the regime, and in particular the secretaries of the Young Communist League branches, are a more repulsive lot than even their adult equivalent. The sulky fanatic, the starry-eyed dupe, the weasel-faced careerist—and after a year or two there will be little to distinguish them—will feel their moral isolation, will lash out mercilessly at any sign of indiscipline, will be in the closest possible contact with the secret police (of which many of them, in fact, will be clandestine members). You will have to learn suspicion, caution, extreme self-control. As soon as the regime is consolidated you will be liable for conscription into the American People’s Army, for a two-year term in peacetime, if any. Discipline will be incomparably tougher, pay lower, leave much rarer than in present day Western armies. Unless your class, family, and general background appear impeccable, you will be restricted to the infantry and need not expect a promotion. In wartime, young and active men who would otherwise have been sentenced to a labor camp will be inducted into “penal battalions” that will be used in particularly dangerous situations such as charging over enemy minefields. The survival rate will be low, but some who have served say that it was even preferable to the slow and mindless dying off in the labor camps.