Isso é provavelmente "Voltando para casa", de Ian Watson, publicado em Insolação e outras histórias (1982) e também em Omni (Dezembro 1982). Nesta história, os EUA desenvolvem uma "Bomba de Super Radiação", que mata seres vivos, mas deixa intactas as propriedades, e a URSS desenvolve a "Bomba Socialista" (SOB), que destrói propriedades, mas não pessoas:
In other words, drop an SOB on New York City and very soon you would have no New York City at all, only an empty space with millions of people wandering around stark-naked. ...
Depois, há uma breve guerra:
In less than an hour the U.S.A. and the USSR exchanged their entire arsenals of Radiation Bombs and SOBs.
Os americanos migram para a Rússia agora vazia, mas a terra de alguma forma os russifica:
... I know—for a fleeting moment—that every building and machine and thing we use is alive, possessed. Locomotives, gastronoms, buses and tractors, offices and ice-cream carts and rouble notes, all tell us what to do, and the way to do it. The whole environment, of Russian making, sucked up their souls for safekeeping, and now they have entered us, like dybbuks. ...
...
America is as wild and empty and far away as it was a hundred thousand years ago before any Asians first traversed the Bering Strait to roam the American plains as Indians. America is a forgotten country. Mother Russia is our land, and we are hers.