If you apply for a post as an executioner, you might be enrolled in one of the municipal firing squads. Your opportunity to carry out individual executions, if such is your taste, will probably be somewhat restricted. The traditional Soviet method of executing single offenders is by means of a bullet in the back of the neck and is invariably conducted neatly and expeditiously by a specialist of officer rank. Mass executions are bound, of course, to occur, and you may well be given a chance to participate in some of them.
Schoolteacher
Under Academic we have dealt with the situation of the university teacher. In preuniversity education, teachers will find that things are, generally speaking, similar. Instruction in mathematics will continue much as before, but most other subjects will have new textbooks and new curricula. Many texts in English literature will be withdrawn, and there will be an emphasis on Soviet and Communist authors of the social realist persuasion, most of whose works will have the texture of sawdust.
You too will have to teach your pupils versions of history that are entirely untrue. You too will have to lead them in ceremonies of loyalty to the regime. You will spend hours on teachers’ committees in which ways of improving the political education of the children is discussed. But, except in the highest classes, you will not have to teach “Marxism-Leninism” as such, merely a set of easily assimilated ideas, a sort of Communist pap or pabulum. You will find that the Party administrators in charge of you are a low-grade lot since the more educated ones will be spread thin in the universities and elsewhere. They will intervene in the clumsiest and most irritating manner. You must not retort in kind.
Be careful of the temptation, while teaching nonsense, to make your true view of it clear to your students by your tone of voice or the expression on your face. One Soviet instruction typical of many, runs:
One must not content oneself with merely paying attention to what is being said, for that may well be in complete harmony with the Party program. One must pay attention also to the manner—to the sincerity, for example, with which a schoolmistress recites a poem the authorities regard as doubtful, or the pleasure revealed by a critic who goes into detail about a play he professes to condemn.
Your position will bring you some particularly difficult problems. First, children are more easily influenced than older people, and you will find at least a few of your pupils beginning to believe what they are told day in and day out. You will be tempted to guide them unobtrusively toward the truth. If you do, be sure to be very careful indeed. Once children are persuaded that it is their duty to report you for deviation, it takes little to persuade them to denounce you. There are always smug, nasty-minded children with grudges against everybody, but especially teachers.
Second, you will also find the opposite problem: many children, especially the younger ones, may blurt out true facts or express their true feelings. You will wish to do all you can to protect them and to protect their families from whom they probably imbibed these “errors.” Yet you will have to tell them that they are wrong while making every excuse for them.
This will all be a very harrowing experience, and it is no wonder that teachers have been among the most severely purged professions in all Communist countries. After a while, if you keep your job, you will adjust as best you can. And you will find as time goes by that the children too have adjusted to the situation and no longer betray themselves. As for the minority whom you regretfully see passing from your hands as offensively loyal robots of the regime, do not worry too much. Some, indeed, will go on to become the new generation of Soviet auxiliaries. But many, even those who may be at their worst at sixteen, will become disillusioned as students or in early adulthood.
Military and civil-defense training will be compulsory in all schools, and you will be required to help where necessary.
Scientist
Certain sciences, such as astronomy, will be comparatively free from official intrusion, but most will be subject to State intervention. If you are a practicing scientist in any field particularly useful to the Soviet Union, you are likely to be deported there, although you will be handled more or less with kid gloves as you will be regarded in the same light as valuable livestock. Once in the Soviet Union, you will be housed in comfortable circumstances in special isolated communities, in the Urals or in Siberia. Provided you behave yourself and work hard, you will be well treated as long as your line of research proves fruitful.
Whether you work for the Russians in the USSR or the United States, you will encounter continuous trouble among your Party managers at all levels. Avoid getting involved in all such backbiting and squabbling and devote yourself, as far as possible, to your own concerns. You are, after all, purely as a scientist, likely to find your work absorbing, and it will help you to forget your troubles. You will find it disturbing and infuriating to be herded into mass projects, harangued by officials, and given timetables and deadlines; but as long as you toe the line, you will probably be able to continue with your own line of research, whatever it is, at least for part of the time, and you may be able to overlook the fact that whatever advances you help to bring about will be put to use to increase still further the powers of a tyrannical regime.
The sting may also be lessened by the sympathy of your Soviet colleagues, most of whom will be sensitive people who silently regard themselves as being in the same boat. Now that Soviet science has come of age, there is less likelihood than formerly that you will become trapped in one of the crasser controversies. Vavilov, the great biologist, fell foul of the quack Lysenko, whose theories were endorsed by Stalin, and he died in the Gulag. Stalin also espoused the peculiar theories of the linguist Marr, who claimed that all language derived from only four basic sounds, and many scholars fell foul of the dictator in consequence and wound up in jail. In modern circumstances, the probability of such bizarre episodes has lessened, but the Central Committee still has the last word in scientific matters. You should be alert and try not to get yourself entangled in controversy. Many scientists, mathematicians, and so on are now in jail or exile in the USSR for applying their reasoning powers to political and social matters. Do not despise the minor skills you may have picked up, such as the ability to repair electrical equipment. If you are purged, this may be valuable even in a labor camp, while elsewhere it may provide you with an income.
Socialist
Socialists with ideas about socialism different from the definition of that form of society thought correct by the Soviet authorities will suffer earlier and more severely than mere democrats and capitalists. The leaders of the Eastern European Socialists are mostly dead or in prison, and all their parties have long since been extinguished.
But at first, for a time, the Russians will encourage a Socialist party. It will have as its leadership, if possible, a few prominent members of the present movement with the addition of a few secret Communists. All the smaller Socialist sects will probably be incorporated into it, as we said in an earlier chapter, at a conference run on “constitutional” lines. Those attending the conference will be rendered amenable both by simple, direct pressure and by the absence due to the arrest of those Socialists who have previously shown themselves strongly opposed to the Soviet system.