by John Hackett
The really crushing blow came from an unexpected quarter, however. Soviet policy had always been at pains either to suppress or to appease any symptoms of independence of mind on the part of the Ukraine. Its enormous contribution to Soviet food supplies, its position in the front line of Soviet territory facing the West, bordering on Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, and its vast hydro-electric potential, had made it, after Russia proper, the most vital component of the Union. It had suffered more than any other republic from the actions of the Soviet state to obtain food supplies by force after the Revolution and from the subsequent persecution of the wealthier peasants. It had been rewarded after the devastation of the Second World War by being given, with Byelorussia to the north, a privileged but fictitious autonomy as a separate member of the United Nations.
Ukrainian nationalist sentiment had been repressed in 1966 in the Kiev trials of intellectuals and members of the Ukrainian Workers and Peasants Union. Their main crime had been to promote the idea of secession from the Soviet Union, a right enshrined in the Soviet Constitution. Repression had only diverted this sentiment into more powerful channels underground. Its modern exponents understood the axiom that successful revolutions begin at the top. They determined to make use of the one important freedom left to the inhabitants of the Ukraine — the access of individual Ukrainians to positions of power in the central apparatus of the Soviet Union. There had been several successful generals; now the favourite son of the Ukrainian nationalists was in the unlikely guise of a secret policeman.
After graduating from the police academy at Kiev in 1960, Vasyl Duglenko had been recommended to Khrushchev by some of the latter’s Ukrainian cronies, and transferred to the KGB headquarters in Moscow. Being still in a junior post he had managed to survive Khrushchev’s fall, and climbed up the precarious ladder of power to be Deputy Commandant, with special responsibility for the security of the Kremlin. He had retained close links with the nationalist cells in the Communist Party of the Ukraine and he had naturally placed a good number of fellow Ukrainians in suitable positions in the KGB, particularly in the Kremlin section.
So a powerful mechanism was in place, and the Minsk explosions provided the opportunity, and the necessity, for its use. Duglenko and his friends in the Ukrainian Party machine had no wish to take part in the last act of a Russian Gotterdammerung. Although they vaguely knew what was about to happen in Poland they saw no sure future in a separatist movement confined to the Ukraine. The central keep of the Soviet system had to be attacked.
At the centre they could join forces with the group of ‘doves’ already referred to in Chapter 24, whose influence had spread, with the worsening news from East and West, even among sections of the command of the armed forces. It would be vital to have some friends there if a coup was to survive its first dangerous hours.
This army group, small at first and of necessity conspiratorial, had decided even before the attack on Birmingham that nuclear war was not going to achieve Soviet objectives in the West, nor restore order in the East. Moreover, in the ensuing destruction of organized life in the Soviet Union the armed forces themselves were likely to disintegrate. A deliberate return of army units to the Russian heartlands offered better hope for a future system of orderly government in which the armed forces would have an effective role, and its commanders a tolerably secure life. Their ideas probably did not include so radical a break-up of the Soviet Union as the Ukrainians secretly envisaged. They would have been in closer agreement on the need to relax the dead hand of centralized control on the economic life of the country, not in the interests of laissez-faire, but in order to restore efficiency and come nearer to matching the agricultural and industrial productivity of the West, not to speak of China-Japan.
As it turned out, both parties, keeping their ultimate objectives to themselves, were able to establish discreet links for the tactical purpose of overcoming the probable insistence of the hard-liners in the Central Committee on committing nuclear suicide.
There was in any case no time to be lost. The Politburo was due to meet on 22 August to decide on further action in the event that the Americans did not comply with the ultimatum to join in talks on maintaining the status quo.
On the morning of the fateful meeting, Duglenko’s boss, the KGB Chief, met with a fatal ‘motor accident’ on his way into Moscow. Duglenko, already in the Kremlin, could now be satisfied that he would have access to the Politburo session. He relied on two things: complete surprise, for which reason no one knew of the details of his plan except the dozen secret policemen required to carry it out, mostly fellow Ukrainians; and the willingness of the Soviet administrative machine of that time to accept orders from the top, whatever they might be — a characteristic which he in fact was determined to change but which on this occasion was to serve him well. When the meeting had assembled and he was summoned to report on the accident to his Chief he drew from his pocket not a sheaf of paper, but a pistol, with which he shot dead President Vorotnikov, and on this signal his fellow conspirators, already on guard outside the room, broke in and disarmed the rest of the Politburo. Duglenko announced that he was assuming the offices of President and Party Secretary; he ordered the removal, under guard, of the leading hard-line members, and received the allegiance of the rest, who had little choice, with guns still drawn all round them.
The next few hours were a feverish race against time, to assume effective command of the armed forces before any counter-move could be made and before any wild orders could be given for nuclear release, to reassure the population, and not least to reassure the Americans and dissuade them from any idea of a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Some of the Soviet commanders were, as has been said, generally favourable to the idea of salvaging what they could from the present unhappy situation, as the only means of keeping the armed forces in being, but very few of them were privy to the details of the conspiracy. It had, of course, been necessary in advance to place one of these few in the post which handled the transmissions of presidential orders to the strategic nuclear forces, so that when Duglenko, having done what was immediately necessary in Moscow, finally got on the hot-line to President Thompson, he was able to assure him confidently that the Soviet nuclear forces had been ordered to stand down, and to ask President Thompson kindly to give corresponding orders on his side. Duglenko proposed in addition a complete ceasefire within twelve hours, and the opening of an early conference in Helsinki to draw up terms of peace.
Even the most expert Kremlin-watchers on the Western side were taken by surprise. In the confusion of the next few hours, while the American answer was being prepared, some voices were heard urging that it was a trick, or that if there were a real upset in Moscow, now was the time to push ahead and finish the Russians off. More accurately, some others argued that this was no more than a change of Russian tactics; the new, more open and more decentralized communism, of which they were getting the first news by monitoring Moscow broadcasts, would in the long run be more dangerous to the West than the brutal obscurantism of its predecessor. Therefore no concessions should be made, the guard should be kept up, and so on. But it was eventually agreed to be thankful for a large if not necessarily permanent mercy, to reciprocate the downgrading of nuclear alert, to accept the ceasefire, and to prepare, with all due caution, for a conference.
Duglenko had to contend with far more arduous decision-making, on no less a subject than the future of the Soviet Union. At a hastily-summoned meeting of representatives of all the constituent republics there was not really much choice but to accept that the Union was in dissolution; independence was now openly proclaimed as the objective of the Ukraine. It had already been achieved by many of the republics in Asia. The Russians now clearly had to accept that whether they liked it or not they were on their own.
It was generally agreed that they would all form a joint delegation to the Helsinki Conference, and at the same time work out the modalities of separation. Needless to say, the violent transition from a
centralized autocracy to multiple nationhood was not everywhere achieved in an orderly manner. Not all the republics were geared to establish their own administrations, and many had deficient economic resources. The enormous problem of disposing of the former Soviet forces, in Europe and Africa and the Middle East, was being handled by UNRRO.
The Conference, as is the way of conferences, proliferated into a whole series, some of which are still continuing, and it would require another volume of this history to do justice to all these deliberations. The collapse of the USSR meant the end of large-scale hostilities in Europe. It did not mean universal peace.
CHAPTER 27: Reflections on a War
Conflicts which the Soviet Union did not start, but which it studiously sought to sharpen and exploit, have yet to be resolved. Fighting still goes on. The pattern of the successor states into which the USSR seems now to be dividing has yet to be fully determined. There are differences between the countries which, under their former regime, were all members of the Warsaw Pact. There are also differences between each one of them and the member states of the Western Alliance, with which they have so lately been at war. To settle all these differences will take time and will be far from easy. Meanwhile, there is still warfare outside Europe. No doubt it will continue, in one way or another, for some time, with whatever resources (and much material has been left behind by the Russians) the belligerents can find.
The Third World War, however, can be fairly said to have ended with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in late August 1985 and the cessation of direct hostilities between the major powers. We have already taken a brief glance at how the world then looked, and in the concluding chapter we look a little into the future. Something more should now be said about what might have happened and did not, about certain contributory factors to the outcome and about some, at least, of the conclusions that can be drawn from these events.
What especially distinguishes the scene we now see about us — and this is something to which we shall only be able to grow accustomed with the passage of time — is the absence from it of the powerful, restless, baleful, expansive, intractably dogmatic imperialism of Soviet Russia.
The world has come out of another bad dream, just as it did out of the Nazi nightmare. This one lasted rather longer. The myth born in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 persisted, before it was dispersed, for nearly three-quarters of a century. It was the myth of the emergence of true democracy from a proletarian explosion, when what had really taken place was the murderous overthrow of a democratically elected government by a fanatical authoritarian minority.
It is argued by some that the basic contradictions of Marxism-Leninism would inevitably have caused, in time, the downfall of any state built on it. Whatever Karl Marx may have contributed to nineteenth-century thought his political philosophy is held by many today, a century later, to be unscientific, romantic and obsolete, no more useful as a guide to government in the twentieth century than the novels of Charles Dickens as a reflection of life today in England. Indeed, if the revolutionary genius of Lenin had not harnessed to the advancement of Marxism a huge and backward group of peoples accustomed to absolutism — most of them Asiatic and some still semi-savage — it might have been consigned to the dust heap of history long ago, and this particular nightmare might never have occurred at all. The nightmare is now over, and we shall never know if the USSR, given time, would have fallen apart by itself or not, without the war it brought about. There may be other nightmares still ahead.
It has been suggested with some plausibility that in addition to the conjunction of miscalculation and mischance which triggered off the explosion of August 1985 there had long been a growing awareness among the rulers of the USSR of increasing strains within the Warsaw Pact, and within the Soviet Union itself, which could hardly be contained without a signal military victory over the capitalist West. There had also been, among the top people in the regime, a very real fear of Germany. There had even been some fear of the capacity of the Federal Republic to lead the West (and above all the United States) into an aggressive war against the communist East. This was a fear which West German insistence on ‘forward defence’ (whatever that might mean — and it clearly meant different things to different people) did little to abate. It was for all that little but the product of the Soviet Union’s own propaganda.
The real causes of this war between the Eastern and the Western blocs will long be matter for debate. Whatever they were the fighting could not, it now seems, find its resolution (if it did not move into the strategic exchange of weapons of mass destruction, which would have emptied the concept of ‘resolution’ of all meaning) anywhere but in Europe. Its focal point could be nowhere but in the Federal Republic of Germany.
The critical point in the military action was therefore bound to be, at least as far as the battle on and over the land was concerned, in what was designated in NATO as the Central Region of Allied Command Europe.
What also seems beyond doubt is that the Soviet plan to penetrate the Northern Army Group, cross the Rhine in the Low Countries, and roll up AFCENT by an offensive thrust from north to south along the west bank of the Rhine, which would have taken CENTAG in the rear, came very close to success. It was well conceived and well prepared, with a not unreasonable assessment of the difficulties involved. This particular plan was an element in a general structure of contingency planning, any one part of which was valid in itself though none was likely to be implemented in isolation. It was the unexpectedly strong Western response to the Soviet intervention in Yugoslavia which pulled the chocks out, as it were, and set the plan for the invasion of the Central Region rolling down the slipway to the launch.
What might have happened in the long run if this plan had come off is quite incalculable. It can be said with complete confidence that in the shorter term it would have brought about the total destruction of the Federal Republic of Germany, and that the Atlantic Alliance would in consequence have lain in ruins. The possibility of a counter-offensive by the United States, in these circumstances, can hardly be conceived. The situation would have been beyond repair.
The bogey of an all-out attack on Allied Command Europe by forces of the Warsaw Pact, planned in total secrecy and carried out with complete surprise by forces already in place, with the aid of massive under-cover operations prepared with absolute security, was not the sort of thing to give sensible men sleepless nights in the years before the war — though it might not have been sensible wholly to disregard the possibility. Much more likely, Allied planners thought, was what actually happened: the implementation of well-prepared contingency plans, involving a high degree of preparation, as crises developing elsewhere showed signs of moving out of control.
Unlikely though it may have been, a surprise attack in the late seventies by in-place forces of the Warsaw Pact would have found Allied Command Europe so ill prepared that its early success could hardly have been in doubt, whether the French came in on the Allied side or not. The US Army in Europe had not yet fully recovered from the Vietnam experience. It was becoming accustomed to the absence of the draft but was already running into serious and unexpected difficulties over reserves as a result of ending it. Stocks which had been run down for the Israeli war were only slowly being replaced. The ‘Reforger’ system, by which formations would be flown in from the continental United States to marry up with equipment pre-stocked in the Federal Republic, though already showing great promise, had not yet been as fully developed as in the years to come.
The Bundeswehr was improving, but although its units were rated by the Russians as the best of the Allied bunch it was still only in moderate shape by the exacting standards of German professional soldiers, while the German Territorial Army was scarcely more than embryonic.
The British Army of the Rhine was again in the throes of reorganization, with the level of provision (and the state) of its equipment causing concern to its officers and with several battalions of its invaluable infantry still in Northern Irela
nd. The forces for defence in depth in NORTHAG, when the inevitable breakthrough occurred and there was no release of Allied nuclear weapons (which would almost certainly have been withheld), were wholly inadequate.
Belgian and Dutch forces were heavily — and dangerously — reliant on reservists with no more than short conscript training behind them, and were still reluctant (particularly in the case of the Dutch) to maintain any considerable strength in proximity to their forward battle stations in the Federal Republic. There was very little hope that in the event of a surprise attack Dutch forces of any real significance would have been able to reach their emergency positions before these were overrun.
The Allied air forces were still ahead of those of the Warsaw Pact in quality of equipment, though the gap was closing. They were also well ahead in the quality of their aircrew, but among the European Allies air forces had been ruinously run down. Air defence with surface weapons, even in Allied Command Europe, was nowhere strong. Some of the equipment was good. The British low-level Rapier, for instance, was outstanding. There were in 1977 only two Rapier regiments in BAOR, however, neither of which was armoured or even tactically mobile. The air defence of Great Britain, upon which so much would depend, was particularly weak. It was almost as rundown as the UK’s civil defences against air attack, whether by conventional weapons or nuclear.
Invasion from a standing start in the late seventies, if it had ever been tried, would almost certainly have brought the Russians to the Rhine in a very few days — unless NATO employed nuclear weapons. What would have happened then is anyone’s guess. A high probability would have been swift escalation into the strategic nuclear exchange which would very soon have rendered the land battle in Europe largely irrelevant.