Though the government apparatus will undergo a great expansion, all the key posts will be taken over by trusted supporters of the Soviets. However, there will be a transition period when the number of people with suitable training will be inadequate, and for a time, numbers of old civil servants will keep their jobs, although many will be purged, and those judged least politically reliable will be demoted or passed over for promotion. In the economic departments all who hold non-Marxist economic ideas will be removed. Salaries at the senior level will be high, with many perquisites such as cars, apartments, and so on; but the lower grades will suffer a sharp decline in real income. Moreover, although many buildings that have been abandoned by or seized from business firms will have been taken over, the expansion will be too great to cope with except by an increase in the numbers of people sharing an office. This should rise to between three and four times as many as now. Privacy is always one of the rarest commodities in a Communist dispensation. There will be a corresponding deterioration in office equipment. Nevertheless, government employ will be the only alternative for many persons who previously owned their own store or business concern or who were employed in one of the now-extinct enterprises.
There is something to be said, in fact, for seeking a job in one of the main offices dealing with the controls, permissions, and documentation now demanded on an ever-increasing scale. In such surroundings, it is easier to remain anonymous and to draw the minimum of attention to oneself—always an important consideration. On the other hand, a post in a small town, where there might be more opportunities for establishing relationships with those involved in the supplies of food and other necessities, has its points; moreover, it will always be advantageous to live where you do not need transport other than a bicycle to get to work. In the cities, where your home may be far from your job, the absence of private cars and the enormous overcrowding and erratic nature of public transport will make your morning and evening commuting a daily nightmare.
One problem that will particularly trouble you, especially during the initial period of disorganization, will be crime. Looters and muggers will have a field day. Because of the presence of the militia and the army patrols, you will not dare to carry anything that during a search might be construed as a weapon; but you and your family ought to make yourselves acquainted with at least the basic rules of unarmed combat in order to be able to defend yourselves against an attack by someone wielding a club, knife, or blackjack. In a fairly short time, however, the situation will ease. Muggers will disappear from the principal thoroughfares, and looters will be shot on the spot. The police will have full authority to fire on suspects however young, and there will be no public or other enquiries afterward.
However, once the immediate postoccupation crime wave has been put down, the authorities will cease to take much notice of nonpolitical crime. Occasional big round-ups of all known criminals will put down particularly overt waves of crime, and those caught will be shipped off to labor camps to serve, as we have seen, as sub-bosses over the much more numerous “politicals.”
But the police will be very busy, not only in all the many aspects of watching the citizens’ loyalties, but also in a wide variety of administrative tasks such as issuing “internal passports.” stamping them, registering all visitors to the particular town, issuing licenses for every sort of activity, and so on.
Soon a new criminal element will spring up. Many will be teenagers. Within a year or two America will have a well-developed caste of “hooligans.” Some will be the veteran survivors of present teenage gangs who have neither been shot nor been incorporated into the “militia” of the new order. Many will be children and young adolescents, thrown into the streets upon the death or arrest of their parents, who will roam the towns and the countryside and commit savage crimes. As for the young thugs who have been taken on by the regime, you may even recognize them, if only from old newspaper photographs, as you see them in uniform, accosting and arresting you, and asking bribes for your release. Experience shows, moreover, that many such criminals become well adjusted to their work and are soon indistinguishable from their more ideological comrades. Several common criminals rose high in Soviet and Eastern European police organizations; one, E. G. Evdokimov, even becoming a member of the Party’s Central Committee.
Organized crime in the form of the Mafia will be put down firmly; although any important member of the Mafia who shows any political sophistication ought to find it possible to arrange to be recruited into the regime’s administrative machine. Official histories of Communist movements relate that even “bandit” groups were incorporated into the Party machinery, with the original leaders usually, but not always, being purged later. Such an arrangement would be of great help to an occupation force without much of a base in the country, although the Mafiosi concerned would have to undertake to abandon crime except for actions on behalf of the Communist authorities.
Major crime rings that are nowadays unbreakable because of American legal provisions will not survive. But small-time crooks will seize the opportunities for bribery and fixing and acting as shady go-betweens offered by endless regulations and ill-paid bureaucrats. Soon, some will hardly be regarded as crooks at all by a population in desperate need of coping with the endless demands of officialdom. In fact, they will be treated almost as public benefactors. From time to time their actions will result in mass trials of fixers, crooks, and officials, leading in some cases to executions in the hope of a deterrent effect although without much long-term success.
So much for life as you will see it in your hometown. There will be many, in the uranium mines and elsewhere, who would return to it with joy. But what of the general prospects? At least, you may feeclass="underline" “Better Red than dead.” Things will not turn out to be so simple, and you and your fellow citizens will not henceforth escape, as you had hoped, the horrors of war. As we have noted, the draft will be reinstituted, and young men will be called upon to serve a stint of two to three years in the “peacetime” American People’s Army. However, it is not likely that peace will prevail, and older men, if necessary to the age of forty and beyond, will also become liable for call-up, particularly in the event that China has not yet been attacked or that China has been attacked but is still carrying on a major guerrilla resistance. In that case, Moscow will be in great need of manpower. And, logically enough, Soviet aims will be best served by leaving Soviet troops to hold America and sending American young men, and the young of other Soviet satellites, to the war zone— under strict Soviet control, just as, at present, Cubans and East Germans are being used in Africa. In addition, if Chinese nuclear development has proceeded as projected, we may expect fusion bomb strikes on prime Soviet targets in America. In that case, America will not have avoided nuclear war by its surrender. But, in any case, such wars will become commonplace in the inevitable splits and schisms that will beset a communized, or largely communized, world.
If Chinese and other resistance is protracted, the Soviet army will be stretched so thin that the American People’s Army may also find itself committed against local patriots in the jungles of Africa and South America. All the same, it is even more likely that they will be sent to reinforce the pro-Soviet Vietnamese Communists as they fight the Chinese on the Mekong. Thus the war objectors of the late sixties may after all find themselves in Southeast Asia as the elderly conscripts of the early nineties.