Within a matter of months, all modes of mass communication will retail no news or information except that which conforms totally to the pro-Soviet line. For years to come, you will read or hear nothing but dreary praise (full of falsified statistics) for the Soviet Union and for the progress made by the new United States. Entire editions and newscasts will be given over to the texts of speeches by Soviet dignitaries and their American followers. Authentic news will be largely absent, and what there is will be highly dubious. This boring mishmash will occasionally be enlivened by accounts of the trials of “war criminals”—American political and military figures accused of waging, or merely planning, war against the USSR. You should not be surprised to find personages for whom you entertain the greatest admiration confessing to barbarities of which you rightly believe them to be incapable. You must remember that they will have been in secret police hands for a minimum of several months.
In the absence of reliable printed or broadcast news, if you wish to remain well informed, you will have to rely on rumor and on foreign broadcasts. Needless to say, not all of the rumors will be true, and many will have been deliberately planted by the authorities.
You will have to develop a feeling for the plausibility or implausibility of anything you hear. Does it seem probable? Does it fit in with other information? Often you will have to suspend judgment until some later piece of information confirms or refutes what you have heard.
You should also develop the knack, common in all Communist countries, of expertly reading between the lines of the official press. Attacks on officials of the Department of Agriculture, for example, taking them to task for mismanagement, probably presages a food shortage or even a famine. Particularly sharp concentration on the evils of China or some other foreign country may well imply that war is contemplated. And so on. You will become adept at interpreting the nuances of the official clichés.
Just as you must take great precautions when listening to foreign broadcasts (if you possess a set powerful enough to pick them up), so you must be very cautious, when it comes to unofficial information or rumor, of whom you listen to and to whom you pass it on. Merely to receive “hostile” information without reporting the “rumormonger” to the police is a criminal offense. To transmit it is worse. However, except in the case of news particularly offensive to the Soviet authorities, you should not encounter too much trouble if you are reasonably circumspect (unless the authorities are looking for some pretext to arrest you anyway). After all, almost everyone, including the local Communists and even the police, will have no alternative except to rely on, and subsequently to spread, that same material. They will live in the same fog that you do.
2. IMMEDIATE DANGERS: PRISON AND LABOR CAMP
SOME OF THE DUST, atomic or otherwise, of the conflict and its immediate aftermath has now settled, and the new administration has taken over your town. The first thing you should bear in mind is that you and your family will face a constant threat of arrest and disappearance either into the labor camps or into the execution cellars.
As we shall see, large numbers of Americans will be doomed to arrest, in any event. For the rest of the populace, it will be largely a matter of luck—although you can temper your fate, at least to some degree, by trying to understand the predicament in which you have landed and attempting to make a swift adjustment to it. We can by no means guarantee that readers of this book will be among the survivors, but at least, we offer some tips that might mean that their chances will be considerably improved.
Arrest
The majority of American citizens are patriotic, naturally outspoken, and innately opposed to the idea of dictatorship. Many frank remarks will be made in the early months of the occupation that will very soon be bitterly regretted.
The Soviet authorities will not, of course, be able to arrest everybody, but since it will be necessary to repress and deter hostile thought and action, the number of arrests will obviously run into millions.
In a “difficult” country like America, where the tradition of liberty has been strong, the probability is that, apart from executions, about 25 percent of the adult population will ultimately be sent to forced-labor camps or exiled under compulsory settlement in distant desert and arctic regions or in the USSR. If past performance is anything to go by, around 5 percent of the prisoners in the labor camps would be women, although in a country like the United States, where women are so influential and play such a prominent role in the national life, the figure may be much higher.
In these circumstances, you will have given thought to the future of your children.
Sometimes, particularly in the early days, it will be usual for children to go to relatives should both their parents be arrested. If you have been unable to make such an arrangement in advance or no such relatives are available, the probability is that they will survive as members of gangs of urchins living on their wits, subject to arrest and incarceration in adult jails as soon as they are in their teens.
Later, State orphan homes, often barely distinguishable from reformatories, will be set up for such children. There they will be indoctrinated in Communist beliefs and, later, if suitable, sent to serve in the police and other units.
You should seriously consider how you can best equip your children for both spiritual and physical survival should they become lost or orphans. First, like yourselves, the rule is to be fit, not fat. When things start to look menacing, your relations with them must be particularly warm and trusting for they will only have you to turn to in a world that is becoming filled with suspicion and hatred and where nobody can be expected to talk freely and honestly. You will have to balance the necessity of never saying anything that they might innocently blurt out in front of unreliable acquaintances or known agents of the regime, against the need to ensure that their basic attitudes towards their country, their religion, and their parents remain as firm as is possible. It will be difficult for you and equally difficult for your children. But remember that experience shows that, on the whole, children remain loyal to their parents’ teaching and example long years after the parents themselves have vanished. They will adapt very quickly to the new conditions and learn how to keep their real attitudes concealed while conforming outwardly to the official cult. With younger children, on the other hand, it may be that they will forget their parents completely. Even so, when they grow and find out for themselves what the real nature of the regime is, any seed you may have planted of a positive kind may still be there, ready for events to help it flower. In Soviet-occupied countries, it has been the young who have formed the core of mass resistance whenever that has become feasible.
You can only do your best, and hope and pray for their future. If you are lucky, and survive, it may even be possible for you to trace your lost ones and, against all the odds, be united with them in fifteen or twenty years’ time.
The first wave of arrests and deportations will be inflicted not on the ordinary citizen but on outstanding and major figures, who will be seized as “war criminals.” They will include political leaders and military men with a record of urging or heading resistance to communism in the international sphere.