Robert Conquest - What to Do When the Russians Come

Advice is difficult. Nevertheless, your chances of saving your life will be improved if you firmly decide not to confess to a capital offense. Interrogation machinery will be severely stretched, and it may be that your interrogator, to save time, will accept a confession of some lesser crime like “anti-Communist propaganda,” which will only earn you five to eight years in a labor camp if you hold out long enough. Never, under any circumstance, believe promises that if you confess to capital crimes, you will be reprieved.

Your other problem—this time one of conscience—will be that you will be asked to name “accomplices.” Try to use names of people you know are dead or have escaped the country or otherwise disappeared. In addition, you may be able to involve Communists or other Quislings.

You will eventually be sentenced, though not necessarily in your own presence—the judgment may merely be a smudged form handed you by a warden. Then, assuming you have avoided execution, you will be packed off to a labor camp.

The trip, in tightly sealed cattle trucks, may last some weeks; and since the labor camp system will at first be more or less unorganized, you are likely to find that you and your companions are simply dumped, in the heat of the summer or the cold of winter, in a wooded area, where you will forthwith be set to work to build your own camp. Meanwhile you will live in a pit dug in the ground and covered with a canvas sheet.

One of the most likely sites for a great concentration of labor camps is in the uranium-bearing area of the Canadian Northwest Territories. There, as in similar projects in the USSR, climatic and other conditions are so hostile that it is hard to attract free labor except by the payment of astronomical wages. In America, too, the Soviet authorities will be able to draw upon an inexhaustible supply of forced laborers. Forced labor will also be employed in other areas of difficult exploitation or where massive unskilled labor is advantageous (for example, in working the oil-bearing shale beds of the American West). We can also expect forced-labor battalions to be put to work in Greenland and, in particular, in exploiting the coal and other deposits of Antarctica, where Soviet rule is likely to have been established by default. If, as is often stated, these deposits prove to be immensely rich, we may expect hundreds of thousands of American prisoners to be sent to work them, with the added advantage that the prisoners’ whereabouts will be quite unknown at home. Conditions there may be expected to be extremely adverse, the work exhausting, and the prospects of survival negligible. Northern Canada, where the death rate will be high by all normal standards, would be a Utopia in comparison.

Uranium mining, however unpleasant, is at least rational. Many of you will find yourselves wasting your lives on projects whose only justification is the grandiose self-importance of political leaders or planners. For here, as everywhere else in the Soviet-type “planned economy,” there will be enormous and idiotic waste. In the Soviet Union, a quite unnecessary and uneconomic Arctic railway to the town of Igarka was labored at for four years in temperatures down to −55° Centigrade in winter, by scores of thousands of prisoners in more than eighty labor camps, at intervals of 15 kilometers along the 1300-kilometer stretch. In the end, only 850 kilometers of rail and of telegraph poles had been built, and then the line and signals, the locomotives, and everything else were abandoned to rust in the snow. In Romania, hundreds of thousands of prisoners’ lives were lost in the Dobruja marshes, building a grandiose “Danube-Black Sea Canal” that was similarly abandoned. And there are many lesser tales of wasteful and useless projects dreamed up by stupid careerists trying to make a name. It will be little consolation to you to know that, when such a project fails, its originator may not be able to escape the search for scapegoats and end up in a camp himself or even be shot for “sabotage.”

Wherever you are sent, you will find yourself working up to sixteen hours a day, from the 5 a.m. reveille, ill clad and undernourished. Even today, in the peacetime USSR, labor-camp ration scales are well below those issued by the Japanese in the notorious prisoners-of-war camps on the River Kwai (which averaged 3,400 calories a day against the Soviet 2,400).

If you at present perform a desk job or follow some other sedentary occupation, it is vital that you make yourself fit and ready for hard manual labor. In all the Communist countries, it has always been found that professors, lawyers, administrators, and officials are among the first people to succumb in the labor camps, where they are suddenly faced with intense physical exertion on inadequate rations.

You might also begin to practice a few skills that might possibly save you, once you are in the camps, from the most burdensome and debilitating work. For example, you might be able to stay alive if you were to take a first-aid course since you could then become a camp medical orderly or nurse. Doctors, subject to the limitations that will be noted later, would enjoy an automatic advantage. A few other professions might prove similarly beneficial. If you are an artist, for instance, the staff of the forced-labor camp will possibly employ you for such tasks as painting the numbers on prisoners’ jackets, and so on, while senior camp officials have often been known to award painters a higher ration in return for paintings to decorate their quarters.

There is one problem that we ought to mention that will concern the relatives of the people who have been arrested. It is this. They are likely to find themselves approached by the secret police with the proposition that they will gain better treatment for the arrested member or members of their family, or perhaps even save them from execution, if they will become police informers and report on the work and private life of their friends.

When this happens, it will present you with a nasty moral dilemma. All the same, it might help you to bear in mind that such promises to ease the lot of arrested relatives have never, in Communist countries, been honored. In any case, the local branch of the secret police will have no control over what goes on in a labor camp hundreds, or even thousands of miles away. Once in the camps, your relatives are in a different world, almost on another planet, and beyond your ken.

Allied to this will be a further ordeal, affecting all rather than merely the closest relatives of the arrested person. Once your husband (for example) has been found guilty and sentenced as an enemy of the people, you, as his wife, together with your children, will be required to repudiate and denounce him. At school, your children will be required to go up and stand beside the teacher’s desk and make a public condemnation and repudiation of their father. This is standard practice everywhere in Communist countries.

In the early phases, when the grip of the occupiers is being tightened to the limit, or after rebellions or other crises, the maximum Soviet terrorist methods will be used. At other times, there may be comparative relaxation. Perhaps we should give you some examples from the present situation in the Soviet Union, when the country is at peace and wishes to avoid making a bad impression in the Western world.

In June 1977, a group of former Soviet prisoners who had managed by one means or another to reach safety in the West gave evidence at a hearing that was conducted at the Institute of Physics at Belgrave Square in London. The hearing was trying to accumulate evidence that might eventually assist in the case of Professor Yuri Orlov, a Soviet physicist who had been arrested in February 1977 on unspecified charges and was being held without trial. Extracts from the hearing were later published in the journal Index (November-December 1977).