Once the transition is over, your business will revert to the State. If you accept this in what your bosses would regard as a constructive manner, there is a faint chance that you might be retained as a manager on a lower level, although it is more likely that you will be transferred to some job in the local economic administration. There it is not impossible that you might be able to work obscurely for a number of years until such time as one of the new generation of Party-trained administrators is ready to take over. Even then, if you become a model of obedience, you might manage to become a janitor or junior clerk in some institution or even be given a small pension.
Whatever happens to you, your class origins will have been recorded on your identity documents and will remain a stigma for the rest of your life. Your children, because of their own class origins, will in all cases be denied equal opportunity in education, in obtaining jobs, and in all other walks of life.
Chicano, Mexican, Spanish American
As in the case of the blacks, the Communists will make every effort, particularly in the earlier days of the Occupation, to harness Chicano aspirations in their own interests.
And, as with blacks, all Chicano organizations will be taken over by Communist appointees, and any who resist this will be disposed of.
There seems to be a real possibility that the Communists—whose administrative principle in the USSR and elsewhere has been a linguistic one—might eventually create a Chicano autonomous area in the Spanish-speaking borderlands or even erect a new state (or possibly cede a strip of territory to a new Soviet Mexico). On the other hand, recent Soviet policy has tended away from such arrangements in favor of giving a preponderant role to economic and administrative factors. Moreover, for a considerable time the idea of leaving America looking on the surface as it always was and thus giving the majority a stable and “patriotic” impression will weigh heavily. In principle, although using lesser nationalisms as weapons in the struggle for power, the Communists rely basically, where they can, on the large industrial state. They will seek to make the United States their main bastion on the continent, basing themselves as far as possible in the majority section.
Different communities will in any case receive different treatment. For instance, the Spanish-speaking community of Florida, with its high proportion of anti-Castro refugees from Cuba, will suffer probably more than any other section of the United States’ population. Their mass transfer back to Cuba as forced laborers, after the execution of the more notable anti-Communist figures, will be automatic unless Castro, or his successor, prefers to leave them to disposition by the Soviet-American secret police, in which case few will escape the Arctic labor camps.
Illegal immigration will cease. Border controls, even between Communist states, are very strict. (And when people cannot move even within their own country without identity documents, and they have to register with the police when outside their hometown, movement will in any case be difficult.) Indeed, depending on their judgment of economic and political needs, it seems probable that the Soviet authorities will initiate a repatriation program for any Chicano labor they regard as surplus.
A Sovietized America will anyhow not be much of an attraction for the poor even of Sovietized Mexico or Colombia.
Chinese American
All Chinese Americans will be automatically suspect. This will apply whether they have shown any sympathy toward the Chinese People’s Republic or to its rivals on Taiwan or whether they have been completely apolitical. If China has still to be overrun by the Soviet Union, they will be regarded as potentially active partisans of the enemy and will be deported from such sensitive areas as the Pacific Coast. Even if and when China has been conquered, they will continue to be looked on as inherently untrustworthy and will be subject to a higher rate of arrest than the ordinary population.
Civil Servant
Russians have always been dedicated pen pushers, and like all inefficient social systems, the Soviet Union is a bureaucrats’ paradise. There will be no lack of reports to compile and forms to fill in, with a corresponding need for hordes of clerks. Senior civil servants will have been removed, but if you are a junior officer in a noncontroversial department, if you stay at your desk, don’t argue with your superiors, and keep your eyes on your work, you will have a good chance of keeping your job until younger and better-oriented people can be produced. Millions of posts of sorts in the civil service, and in the even more greatly enlarged local administrations, will become available for those thrown out of work by the cessation of various productive enterprises. Real wages will be low, but little real work will be required.
Clergyman
All churches will be registered. They will come under the leadership of officially approved boards responsible to the Religious Affairs Office of the government. A selection of pro-Communist clergy of each denomination will be solicited as members of “peace” committees and other similar bodies. Government policy towards the churches will vary. There will be periods, particularly in the early days, when church leaders who are reluctant to submit to official control will be arrested and subjected to public “trials,” after which they will be sent to prison or a labor camp. Local clergy will also be liable to mass arrest.
It will be general policy to close down as many churches, seminaries, and theological colleges as possible, while leaving enough to justify the assertion that religious liberty is not being infringed. Large sums and spacious premises will be given to the League of Militant Atheists; antireligious museums will be opened in the main cities; and courses of atheist lectures will be given throughout the country on Lenin’s principle that: “Every religious idea, every idea of God, even flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness.”
It will be illegal to teach children a religious faith. This will be hard to enforce on a family basis, but priests and rabbis who feel it their duty to teach children religion will be arrested when caught.
A few minor religious groups, including the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Ukrainian Uniates, will be totally suppressed; and others, including the Mormons and Christian Scientists, will be treated with notable rigor.
The Jewish religion will suffer severely; only a few synagogues will remain open, the Hebrew scriptures will be hard to obtain, and pressure will be brought to prevent the baking of matzohs. Many rabbis will be arrested on trumped-up charges of black market activity.
Baptists will also be peculiarly ill regarded by the Communist authorities since, although they will have imposed on them an official leadership appointed by the State, it has been found that everywhere in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union—and the same will presumably happen in America—they reject such leadership and tend to set up illegal or semi-illegal structures of their own. The Russian answer will be mass arrests, but even so they will be unable to root out the movement entirely.
The choice for the clergy of other religious bodies is either to return to the catacombs or to try to reach an accord with the State to leave them at least a few seminaries and churches. They will then have to devote much time to keeping as much control as possible out of the hands of agents intruded by the State. Church leaders taking this option will face a hard and continuous balancing act and many problems of conscience.