If you are a real writer, and you can somehow manage to emigrate to a free country before the Soviet army takes over, you should probably make up your mind to go. It will not be an easy decision. You will be reluctant to cut yourself off from your own roots, from your people in their hour of agony, from the sources of your inspiration. It is worthwhile consoling yourself with the thought that many writers before you have chosen to live as exiles and that in many cases emigration has not only not damaged but has actually sharpened their perceptions and intensified their art. We put forward one fact that may help you to decide. In The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (1962), we find that the average age at death of those writers who went into exile after the Russian revolution was seventy-two, whereas the average age at death of those writers who chose to stay behind was forty-five. The higher life expectancy of the exiles was twenty-seven years. (See also Actor; Artist; Filmmaker; Musician.)
Youth
You will find yourself under very heavy pressures of a type to which your present life has not accustomed you.
On the one hand, the Communist victors will hope above all to be able to harness the strength and spirit of the American young to their scheme of things. On the other, young people everywhere, although perhaps especially in America, have a tradition of nonconformity, rebellion against authority, a desire to think for themselves.
We would expect many American young people—especially those young enough not yet to have spouses or children—to throw themselves into the tens of thousands of spontaneous flare-ups of resistance that will mark the early days. Many will be killed, many captured and sent to labor camps. But there will be many survivors; some will join the partisans, and some will fade back into the background, having learned a bitter lesson.
To these latter, during the phase of consolidation of Communist power, we offer the same counsels of prudence we gave their elders. It will be much harder for the young and ardent to maintain the same restraints. You will make the effort. You will grow up, become tempered, and mature very quickly.
The special Communist effort to indoctrinate you will mean that you will be under considerably higher pressures than your elders. Membership of the Communist party itself will probably never be allowed to rise above a few million, and there will be no question of forcing adults, except in certain specialist posts, to join it. The Young Communist League, however, will number tens of millions, and for most jobs available to the young, and studentships at universities, joining will be almost unavoidable. This will mean that you will lose several hours a week at compulsory sessions in Marxism-Leninism, the Communist version of current events, and so forth, in addition to endless harangues about loyalty and the florious future, which you will be expected to applaud.
You will find that the youth leaders who serve the regime, and in particular the secretaries of the Young Communist League branches, are a more repulsive lot than even their adult equivalent. The sulky fanatic, the starry-eyed dupe, the weasel-faced careerist—and after a year or two there will be little to distinguish them—will feel their moral isolation, will lash out mercilessly at any sign of indiscipline, will be in the closest possible contact with the secret police (of which many of them, in fact, will be clandestine members). You will have to learn suspicion, caution, extreme self-control. As soon as the regime is consolidated you will be liable for conscription into the American People’s Army, for a two-year term in peacetime, if any. Discipline will be incomparably tougher, pay lower, leave much rarer than in present day Western armies. Unless your class, family, and general background appear impeccable, you will be restricted to the infantry and need not expect a promotion. In wartime, young and active men who would otherwise have been sentenced to a labor camp will be inducted into “penal battalions” that will be used in particularly dangerous situations such as charging over enemy minefields. The survival rate will be low, but some who have served say that it was even preferable to the slow and mindless dying off in the labor camps.
But with all the casualties your generation will suffer, millions upon millions of you will survive. And on record, the Communists have never succeeded—in spite of appearances to the contrary—in carrying out their program of fully indoctrinating the young. You should remember that the vast majority of your age group, not only in America but throughout the Soviet world, is at heart disaffected. However much, over the years, your immediate needs take precedence, this core of your personality will remain. And you have one great point in your favor: unlike your parents, you may find that the overthrow of Soviet power will come when you are still in the full vigor of, perhaps, your forties, when you will provide the leaders to build a new America and a new world.
6. THE QUALITY OF LIFE
YOU WILL FIND the altered climate of your life hard to adjust to. The first physical and psychological effects of the defeat, however it comes about, will be very terrible and will last months, perhaps years. You will have been shocked into a state of numbness that will rob many people of the will to live, against which you will have to struggle or succumb.
Then, as the Occupation tightens its grip, you will have to accustom yourself to the prospect of living a life that will be totally politicized. In all Communist countries, politics is an obsession, the central core of all thought and activity. You will find that your life is heavily bound up with questions of your own orthodoxy; with matters of heresy, schism, blasphemy, and back-sliding, and of the orthodoxy of the people around you. Not only will you be required to attend lectures on Marxism-Leninism at your place of work, but the newspapers you read, the television you watch, the radio you listen to, even the very streets around you will be filled with Communist slogans and exhortations. You will not be able to attend a football game or walk through a park without being subjected to propaganda speeches from massed loudspeakers. One particular irritation will be the visits of delegations from any still democratic countries, consisting of Communist sympathizers whose fulsome praise for the new order and the happiness of the Americans living under it will be sure to turn your stomach. Such things you will find maddening, but you must accustom yourself to them and put up with them, for to appear bored or hostile will be dangerous. After a time you will find that you hardly notice.