Within two to three years, any remaining Socialist leaders inclined to show any sign of independence will be eliminated, and the Socialists will be merged (once again “voluntarily”) with the Communist party. A very few Socialist leaders will be accorded positions in the new organization. These, of course, will be men who have already collaborated unreservedly. Even so, few of them will last long. Some will vanish into oblivion, others into the labor camps and prisons, as did the stooge Arpad Szakasits, who betrayed the Hungarian Social Democratic party to the Communists.
Student
You will not get to college if your parents have been classified as social or political undesirables. Children of working-class parents will in principle enjoy preference over middle-class parents, but in fact, the children of collaborators and Party functionaries will have priority, whatever their scholastic abilities. (And the employment by the Communist rich of teachers wishing to supplement their salaries by private tutoring will give them a certain advantage even there.) For ordinary students, as against the children of Party members, the entrance requirements will be stricter than they are now. The curriculum will be drab and examinations will be strenuous. Punctual and regular attendance in class will be obligatory, especially in the courses in Marxism-Leninism. Military and paramilitary training will take place, although this will be in addition to, not in place of, the normal two years of military service that will precede or follow the years at the university. Students will be expected to be polite, and their clothes and personal grooming will be in accord with the institutional dress code. The student leadership will be appointed by the Communist administration, and student protests, strikes, sit-ins, and other demonstrations will be promptly and unequivocally put down if they occur. Offenders will be dismissed from college and sent to jail. Students will also be liable to free and “voluntary” service to the State; for example, at the times of planting and harvesting you can be sent to work for ten hours a day and for a month or six weeks at a time, in the fields with the regular farm workers, picking potatoes, cabbages, beets, and other row crops. This will keep you physically fit but will interfere somewhat with your studies.
As the system settles down, a flourishing market in examination papers, professional examination sitters, and so on will arise. If, even so, you fail your examinations, it will often be possible to buy fake credentials. Influential parents will usually be able to obtain improved marks for their children through threats or bribes—a perennial scandal in the USSR today. (See also Youth.)
Surgeon (see Doctor)
Technician (see Engineer)
Television Station Owner or Employee (see Journalist)
Trade Unionist (see Industrial Worker)
Honest trade union leaders will be bustled off at once to the labor camps. Crooked ones, who can be expected to be familiar with the strong-arm tactics called for in the first days of the Occupation, will last longer. The smaller craft unions will be abolished and those that remain will be concentrated into large, streamlined corporations with all leading posts under direct Party and secret police control. Trade union conferences will rapidly become spectacles at which the decrees and policies of the Party will be ecstatically and unanimously rubber-stamped. This in fact will be the chief function of the trade unions: to facilitate the control, discipline, and unity of the workforce. Questions of pay and working conditions will be of secondary importance and will in practice be the concern of Party officials. To resist or question the decisions of the employer, who will now be the State, will bring you penalties.
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.
Traitor, Quisling
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 Agent or Travel Agency Employee
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.
Trotskyite
In your case the prognosis is so grave that your only alternative to flight would seem to be to prepare to die.
University Teacher (see Academic)
Veterinarian
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.
Worker (see Trade Unionist)
Writer
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.