Homosexual
Male homosexuality is illegal under all Communist regimes. The usual sentence will be five to ten years in a labor camp. As with other regulations, this will not be invariably enforced if political considerations make it convenient in individual cases to proceed otherwise. The regime occasionally prefers to secure the collaboration of the homosexual by holding the other alternative over him. In the takeover period, the police will probably be too busy to pay much attention to the persecution of homosexuals in general, but gay liberation and organizations designed to promote their interests will at once be banned, and those who attempt to persist with them will be instantly arrested.
Hospital Employee (see Dentist; Doctor)
Hotel Owner or Employee
Hotel owners will be dispossessed and, if they are fortunate, may be given employment in lower grades of the industry. Those hotels that are permitted to continue will operate in a notably run-down condition, although some of the luxury hotels will be maintained at a level somewhat below their best in order to cater to the Soviet and Communist elite and other important visitors. In these major establishments, all rooms will be bugged, with a special central office listening in at all times. Only “cleared” and reliable staff will remain, and they will be required to act as government informers. In ordinary hotels, also State-run, jobs will be available at a reduced salary, but there will be less work to perform as little service will be given beyond the provision of a more-or-less clean room.
Indian (Native American)
The Communists will make what use they can of Indians and the Indian movements, although they will not have the priority given to the more numerous black and Chicano elements.
The reservations, probably renamed “autonomous areas.” will be maintained, but the inhabitants will have no right to the oil and other resources in them, which will be the property of the State. And there will no longer be any bar to white or other settlers. The Indians will become citizens, although of course, the advantages of citizenship will be few. A few select Indians will be given impressive-looking posts, largely of a cosmetic nature; for example, there will be an Indian commissioner for native American affairs together with a number of Congressmen of the new style.
Indian organizations will be purged of any independent elements of leadership. As the record of the tribes and many subgroups in the Soviet Union shows, it will be difficult to find any Indians who are real Communists, or even near-Communists, to be heads of the administration of the autonomous areas; the Communists will have to make do with supervision by unobtrusive white “advisers.” Indian languages, dances, customs, and folkways will be encouraged but guided into the desired channels. For example, new “folk songs” will be required, extolling the virtues of communism. At the same time, as elsewhere, Indians will be forced into collective farms. Those who live a mobile existence, such as the Navajo, will be compelled to settle.
In general, the interests of the State economy will be put before those of the small peoples. A Soviet commentator has written of similar groups in areas in the mountains bordering China:
The present-day Khakassi living in the Khakass Autonomous Province are a minority in the national composition of Khakassia. The non-Khakassian population in Khakassia forms a majority and outnumbers the Khakassi several times. This has occurred during the last twenty years chiefly because the Khakassi, few in number, were not in a position to ensure the rapid development of a powerful industry having All-Union and All-State importance, for the establishment of which favourable local conditions exist. This is also applicable to the Shors… and the Altais of the High Altai Autonomous Province… It is difficult to say what will be the ultimate fate of each of the small ethnographic groups and peoples…
But not too difficult to guess; and for Khakass, Shor, Altai, read, in the American context, Navajo, Hopi, Apache.
In the Soviet Union, mountain and desert peoples like the Chechens and Kalmyks, resembling many of the Western Indians, were driven into a more desperate resistance than that of any section of the population; and several were among those later deported en masse (men, women and children) to Siberia, although some of these were later allowed to return.
Meanwhile, those of you who inhabit mountain or desert country will possess certain advantages in that it will be difficult to keep you under constant observation and control. Our advice is: Keep your more unassimilable customs and folkways as far out of sight as possible; take what you are given; do not be deceived by temporary advantages; and unless you are desperate, do not offer resistance. But you will be prepared, if you do become desperate, to revert to the guerrilla-type existence of your forefathers. You should be more successful than most.
Industrial Worker
In theory, you will be the bulwark of the new socialist America.
You and everyone else will read a vast amount of propaganda about your heroic efforts in industry, and about your devoted loyalty to the new “workers’ state.” Control of your organizations will be the major concern of the Communist party (see Trade Unionist).
All this will have some slight advantages, up to a point. Over minor offenses, for example, you will be treated comparatively lightly. With major matters such as opposition to the regime, on the other hand, your status will count against you since you will have proved yourself a “traitor to your class.” After the needs and wishes of the new bureaucratic elite have been satisfied, your children will, in the first decade or so have preferential access to education and indoctrination.
You will find a good many changes in your work. Trade unions will be totally under Communist control, and while they will administer holiday and insurance funds, they will have no right to oppose the management. The basic rule to which everything else must cede is the fulfillment of the “plan.” Since this is allotted from Washington, it will often be unrealistic, and you will be forced to work a great deal of overtime, almost invariably without special payment—especially toward the end of each month.
You will be issued a “labor book” that will list your successive jobs, with each management’s comments on your reasons for being transferred, including censure.
It has been the industrial working class above all, in spite of the pretenses of the Communist party, which has been the backbone of resistance in the Communist lands; as in Plzeň and East Berlin in 1953, in Budapest and Poznan in 1956, in Gdansk and elsewhere in 1970, and finally in the great Polish Solidarity movement today—to name some major worker militancy in Soviet-controlled countries. And in the Soviet Union itself, huge worker outbreaks have taken place in the last couple of decades in places like Novocherkassk, Temir-Tau, Krivoy Rog, Dneprodzerzhinsk.
These are signs that the worker does not really do very well out of the system administered in his name. But they also show that in certain circumstances worker unrest can spearhead major revolt against the regime. It is notable that some of the most powerful outbursts, even in the USSR itself, have come when economic resentment has been linked with political resentment—some Soviet riots and strikes were touched off by economic suffering, others by workers’ resentment at their colleagues being jailed and beaten to death by the police. But the most powerful movements of all have taken place when worker resentment has been linked with national hatred of the Soviet occupier. You will probably find this to be the case in America.