LIFE IN A REAL RED AMERICA

There are two “Amerikas.” One is the ABC miniseries that begins tonight. The other is the fictive specter that, sight unseen, has hit an American political nerve throbbing through 40 years of Cold War atmospherics.

What if it really happened? What if, 10 years down the line, American postage stamps read “The United States of Soviet Socialist Republics?”

What would our political system be? How would our economy work? What would make up our cultural and social life? How much of our traditional and Constitutional freedoms would we have? Would the American temper become fundamentally altered? What about the quality of our lives? Would there be any, in the humane, spiritual, materialistic senses of the word?

“Amerika,” as you’ve no doubt heard by now, posits the takeover of the United States by the Soviet Union after a quick nuclear blast in the atmosphere knocks out the U.S. telecommunications defense system, thereby deactivating any military response.

Some military analysts don’t consider this an implausible scenario--the knockout, that is; virtually no one thinks a Soviet occupation of the United States is remotely feasible. The U.S. defense communications system, which stretches across the globe like a great delicate web reaching to Australia, is indeed vulnerable (as is that of the U.S.S.R.).

Calendar contacted a number of government officials, national political figures and experts on Soviet affairs. Most consider the idea of a Soviet takeover of the United States unspeakable--literally.

But some experts, though circumspect, were willing to hypothesize. Their general conclusion was that a Soviet takeover of the United States would be logistically impossible and is not a part of any long-range Soviet foreign policy plan.

But modern history shows numerous models of what a Soviet occupation would be like, and on that basis a Rand Corp. Soviet affairs analyst offered a characteristic scenario.

Sergei Zamascikov, 35, is also a Soviet defector (“I prefer the word emigre . ‘Defector’ is not a profession”). In addition to working for Rand, he’s a research associate at the Center for International and Strategic Affairs at UCLA. Before he left the Soviet Union in 1979, he was an Army political officer and an official with Komsomol, the Young Communist League in Latvia.

He began his outline with a demurral.

“The whole story is implausible,” he said. “The Soviet Union just isn’t able to occupy a land-mass the size of the United States. They don’t have the means to deploy that many forces. After the Korean war there was a plan to deploy a force across the Bering Strait and invade Alaska; it was told me by a Soviet military officer in the Far Eastern military district who defected in 1980. The plan was to deploy 50,000 men. But again, that was Alaska and they had just one brigade. Too, there would have to have been an alliance with Canada.

“If I were a Soviet war planner, I wouldn’t contemplate a military adventure in this hemisphere. You might use Cuba as a launching site for airborne forces, and subvert U.S. neighbors, like Mexico. But the U.S. political system itself is too stable. The American people support it even when it’s in trouble.

“Let’s imagine this as a lab situation, then. To begin with, the conquest of America could start with a European occupation. The Soviets could eliminate our nuclear deterrent by getting us to sign an agreement to get rid of nuclear weapons. In the meantime, they’ve hidden warheads away in submarines and are now in a position to blackmail us.

“If you look at Soviet history, you realize that they know what a coup d’etat is. Lenin was a good theorist along this line. You’d have to take over the communications, the telephone and the computer systems. The Soviets would use their own signal troops for monitoring purposes. The KGB has communications specialists already in place in Washington, New York, and other major communications centers. They’re called sleepers, middle executive types who are only activated in wartime. Resistance therefore would be difficult to organize. All private telephones and ham radios would of course be confiscated.

“The Soviets would have to disarm the population, a difficult thing here because in the U.S. you have the right to bear arms. The same is true in Afghanistan, which has been a big problem for the Soviets.

“The primary goal of the Soviets would be to establish their own system of control over the police, the FBI and the military. All the domestic leadership would be arrested. All FBI, police and military leaders would be executed and Soviet personnel put in charge. The armed forces would be carefully screened. The borders of Mexico and Canada would be fortified, so there wouldn’t be escape.

“Popular community leaders capable of organizing the masses would be sent to concentration camps in remote places like the Dakotas or Montana--they’d be called ‘educational’ or ‘rehabilitation’ camps, as you saw in Vietnam. This would include the extreme left wing, incidentally, which is despised by the Soviets and tolerated only when it agitates in other countries.” (Calendar tried to reach former Communist activist Angela Davis and Gus Hall, leader of the U.S. Communist Party, but neither responded.)

“Who would perform this stuff?” Zamascikov asks. “Even if the Soviets brought in an occupying force of 2 million, it wouldn’t be enough. On the other hand, with its good roads, willing work force and computer technology, the government has a lot of power in influencing the individual. Orwell is a good reference; so is Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451.’

“The first phase of occupation would be garish. People would be killed, resistance would be cruelly suppressed. There’d be spot executions. Then things would gradually come to a ‘normal’ state. In 1940, when Hitler occupied France, it was bad at first, but people had the Petain government. After the army surrendered, everyone managed under an orderly occupation government.

“The dirty work of security, such as prison guards, would be taken over by the home society. Two or three percent of any society has elements who’ll do anything for money. The Soviets and Nazis both have used criminals who serve in exchange for freedom and privileges.

“On a more sophisticated level there’d be an evolving political superstructure. There’s always some dissatisfaction with a government. The Soviets might charge that we’re trying to poison them with biological agents, and say they’re appealing to progressive and reasonable elements of society and that an occupation would only be temporary. They might even get someone to invite them here. And they wouldn’t play up the Communist Party. They’d change the name to another kind of democratic party, and permit the Republican and Democratic parties of American government to exist--temporarily.

“Newspapers would be allowed to operate--you can find people who’ll write whatever you ask for if you pay them enough. I don’t call them journalists, but they can be found. Television of course would be censored. Though some rabbis and priests would be accused of subversion, religion generally would be tolerated--except for Baptists, who do not allow themselves to be registered. The church, being more interested in spiritual than political matters, would probably compromise in order to continue to operate.”

As for the economy, Zamascikov thinks the Soviets would not collectivize, but would instead impose a restructuring of private ownership, such as farmlands. The automobile, oil, steel and defense industries would be nationalized, and controlled by special ministries (the defense sector would also have political officers appointed to keep an eye on their military counterparts). Personal savings would be liquidated.

Another in-built feature of a Soviet economy is “the privilege system.” Explains Zamascikov: “Since genuine economic incentive would be eliminated and salaries reduced, there would eventually be a scarcity of commodities. You may find it hard to believe, but Czechoslovakia was fifth in the world in per capita income before Hitler moved in, and then the Soviets. The privilege system allows the government to manipulate the people. It keeps the political system more intact than anything. If you’re getting your first job, you have access to a certain store. If you’re a foreman, you have the freedom to go to another that may have better goods, and so on up the line. If you’re well-placed, you can get the better apartment, the better car. You can get your children into better schools, whether they’re qualified or not.

“The strongest defenders of the system, as a result, aren’t the people at the top; it’s the people two or three rungs from the bottom--the strongest defender of military discipline isn’t the general, it’s the sergeant.”

Education, incidentally, would be a high priority. “The Soviets would never tolerate a 20% illiteracy rate, which is the case now in America. As Lenin put it, ‘An illiterate man cannot be a political man.’ Of course, we’re not talking about real education. We’re talking about indoctrination. You can’t indoctrinate the illiterate. The hardest thing to find when I was living in Russia was a genuine world history book.”

Much of Zamascikov’s information is encapsulated in a 1984 book by Robert Conquest and Jon Manchip White called “What to Do When the Russians Come, A Survivor’s Guide” (published by Stein and Day). The book warns of a notable penchant on the part of Soviet troops for raping the women of occupied countries. “That’s not far-fetched,” Zamascikov concedes. “Though Conquest tries to bring an extreme case, such a thing is not implausible. It comes from the World War II accounts of Soviet soldiers in Eastern Europe, and we do have a number of reports from Afghanistan saying this is still true.”

Jonathan Sanders takes a somewhat more wry look at the specter of the Sovietization of America. Sanders is a Sovietologist and CBS consultant who founded a Soviet TV-watching program at Columbia University. “The reality of a Soviet takeover of America is just about as plausible as our taking over Pluto and turning it into the Bikini Islands,” he said from New York.

Still, if one must speculate further, he adds, “These stereotypes of the Soviets as puppeteers, though there’s some of that, is unrealistic. If you want to ask how they could exert power here, it would largely be through the blind ambition types characterized by John Dean, the kind of people who turn minorities and dissidents in to the FBI, people who could be easily convinced to turn other people in, people who beat up draft resistors.

“As for security, you might see the kind of operation we had in Grenada. The police would fit into the national character.” Sanders isn’t convinced that the popularly received impression of traditional American individualism, nonconformity and dissent would pose a special problem for a Soviet controlling force.

“The degree of American conformity outside urban areas is enormous. Do you see a toleration of interracial marriage? What kind of tolerance is there in Oklahoma City for the Mohawk haircut? We overrate the diversity of American society. Certainly we have a Bill of Rights, but how much diversity do you see in TV?. This is a country with a huge AIDS epidemic, but you can’t get AIDS prevention ads--meaning condoms--on the (networks).

“To successfully take over another country, you have to acknowledge its national character. A Soviet takeover here would be somewhere between the takeover of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and the American occupation of Japan, where we didn’t make them speak English. The French Revolution overthrew an order, but it didn’t change the people. You can’t make all of America a Gulag. What’re they gonna do, outlaw baseball?”

If America cites Soviet violations of human rights, Sanders thinks the Soviets have a case against America as well. “They’d probably think it a more just system to take away George Will’s mansion and give some of it over to the starving, to relieve social desperation.” Sanders does not perceive a universal de facto love of freedom or equality in America. “There’s a powerful streak of anti-intellectualism and narrow-mindedness that is traditionally part of the American character. The people who bomb abortion clinics here--you know that’d stop in a Soviet system.” As for public services, “I’d be very happy to see the Soviets take over the New York Subway system.”

Sanders thinks there is much more underlying emotional accord between the American right-wing conservative and the Soviet system than would ever seem likely on the surface. “Think of all the single mothers, black mothers on welfare, the permissive parents who leave a generation of the disenfranchised that trouble American society. The Russians love child-rearing and family values. And state discipline. Pavlik Morozov was a Soviet hero in the ‘30s; he was a child who turned in his parents.”

If the Russians ever came, Sanders implies, they’d probably be the worse off. “American youth culture is the most insidious thing in the world. Where the Russians have the ballet, we have MTV. Conditions are Spartan in Russia, but they value a life of the mind. The Russian system is spooky, creaky and oppressive. But the wonderful thing about the U.S.S.R. is the people. Friendship is central to everyone’s life. There’s a memory hole there, but there’s a memory hole here too. It’s the people who make the difference.”

William Potter, executive director of the Center for International and Strategic Studies at UCLA and a specialist in Soviet affairs and arms control, considers “Amerika’s” premise “implausible to the point of being unimaginable,” and cited the awesome logistical demands an invasion of the United States would make on the Soviet military apparatus.

“If 100,000 Soviet troops are fighting 15 million in Afghanistan and getting nowhere, where are they going to get a force of millions to take over the United States? How will they even get here, considering the support the United States would get from Western Europe? And they’d still have to leave a sizable force behind to defend their borders.

“Given Soviet paranoia, how would they feel about millions able to travel freely in this country? There’s also the problem of troops identifying with the citizenry--there are Russian Muslims, for example, who don’t like fighting Muslims in Afghanistan. In World War II, Stalin was so suspicious of Russian POWs returning from Germany that he jailed them all over again (novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn being perhaps the foremost example).

“Frankly, Soviet troops don’t fight well unless they’re defending the motherland, and they’re not as adept at governing as they are at conquering. Their classic explanation is the term ktokovo, which means ‘who conquers whom?’ They don’t really see co-existence. They see a zero sum game, where one side wins and the other side loses, with nothing in between.

“This isn’t the same world anymore as the one Marx envisioned when he was writing in the middle of the 19th Century. I know of an elderly Russian woman who visited here for three months. When she went home she was excited. ‘I’ve been to America and seen communism,’ she said, meaning that the good communism was supposed to deliver has been realized by capitalism in the West.

“If you want to ask what’s the greatest threat to constitutional freedom in America, I’d argue that it comes from within. The real threat is not external, like a U.S.S.R. invasion. A much graver threat is posed by our own attorney general, when he puts the President above the Constitution, asks us to re-think what the basic rights of Americans are, and tries to undo 20 years of civil rights legislation. We’re threatened by our own increasingly ethnocentric educational system, which doesn’t allow diverse views. If you ask people what they think about the Bill of Rights, they’ll believe in the words, but a lot of them won’t have a great comprehension of what those words mean.”

Concluded Zamascikov, vis-a-vis the premature derision with which “Amerika” has been greeted: “A good outcome of this movie is if it leads people to think.

“It’s unfortunate that the sensational and the primitive get more attention than the serious problems our systems face. Isn’t it ironic that this discussion comes about because somebody made this silly movie?

“After the Reykyavik summit, we discovered that there’s a revolution going on in the Soviet military establishment. But nobody’s talking about it.”

Dimitri Simes, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, listened to the scenario of Soviet occupation outlined by his fellow Sovietologists. He too acknowledged that the Soviets would be hard-put against the sheer size of an American resistance. Describing the attempt, he added, “It’d be a brutal process. It’s probably not on their agenda. But if you think of it in terms of a balance of power, the premise is not outrageous.”