The Third World War - The Untold Story

by Sir John Hackett

  On the square, by the Historical Museum, the single barrel of a 57 mm anti-aircraft gun thrust upwards to the sky. A few batteries of these guns covered the city centre. The roaring crowd appearing round the corner caught the gun crew completely unawares.

  People swarmed over the anti-aircraft gun from all directions. They offered the soldiers opened bottles of wine. Then, suddenly, from the Kremlin walls a machine-gun cracked its leaden whip. People fell injured and dying.

  “Brothers, soldiers - defend us!”

  The sergeant commanding the gun crew drew his pistol and aimed it into the crowd. Instantly, one of his own soldiers bayoneted him in the back. The crowd ducked under the walls for shelter from the machine-gun fire. The Kremlin guards' fire was answered by a hand-held machine-gun from somewhere in the crowded square. But the Kremlin machine-gun behind the ancient and mighty walls was invulnerable. Then the anti-aircraft gun swung smoothly round. The loader threw a clip of ten shells into the breach, the weapon swallowed and discharged them, and disgorged the empty cartridge cases on to the stone pavement. Ten explosions so close to each other as to be almost simultaneous broke through the ancient wall, into the embrasure in the Spassky Tower through which the machine-gun was firing. The square was shrouded in brick dust and filled with the smell of burning explosive.

  “Hurrah-ah-ah!”

  “And again!”

  “Aim at the stars, the stars!”

  “At the gates!”

  “At Lenin!”

  But the gun crew knew better. The loader threw in another clip and this time the gun swung slowly from left to right, firing off single unhurried shots at the Kremlin walls, breaking the merlons which concealed the automatic weapons of security guards. The high building immediately behind the Kremlin wall was now in its turn being torn apart by exploding shells. Masonry and glass came crashing to the ground. A roar of approval from the crowd accompanied every shot. The gunners would gladly have fired at the doors of the Lenin Mausoleum but there were people there already trying to break their way in with improvised battering rams. Instead, the barrel of the anti-aircraft gun swung smoothly upwards and with a tongue of flame in one single shot shattered to smithereens the red star topping the Spassky Tower.

  The Mausoleum guards had fled but the black marble doors of the Mausoleum itself stood fast.

  “We'll have to break it open, all the same,” someone shouted in the crowd, “and have him out.”

  “No use! Lenin rotted years ago, it's just a wax effigy there now!”

  “We'll get in and see!”

  “It's not Lenin that's rotted,” someone had to make a speech, “it's Leninism. It rotted when Lenin broke up the Constituent Assembly . . .”

  But there was nothing to be done: the Mausoleum had been well built in its time. The crowd cleared out of it on to Red Square where they strung up without ceremony several men who had been identified as members of the Central Committee, indiscriminately mixed with ordinary Kremlin security guards. Aux lanternes!

  It was the members of the Politburo that were now being sought by this rampaging crowd, but they were nowhere to be found. They had escaped by an underground passage into the Metro where an armoured train was waiting to whisk them away.

  Not the Kremlin itself but the buildings housing the Communist Party bureaucracy within the Kremlin were ablaze. The Kremlin churches were unharmed. People flocked into them, praying on their knees for the Lord God to forgive the sins of His long-suffering people.

  For sixty-eight years Moscow had not heard church bells. Now, high above Moscow, Ivan the Dread, the great bell of all Russia, awoke from his slumber. His mellow chime rang out over the ancient city, where the communists in little more than half a century had destroyed so many more people than even the Tartars in 300 years. Hear what the ancient bell has to say - “forgive our enemies ...” - What? Nobody is doing any forgiving here. Aux lanternes!

  Along the avenues of Moscow, members of the Party, many protesting to the end in vain that they were not really communists, hung like bunches of grapes from the lamp posts. So many of them! It was done quickly - some by the neck to die, some by the legs already dead. Rope ran out. Electric light cable did very well instead. At the Lyubyanka a battle raged. It was a vast building, with 1,000 people inside, all armed with pistols. On the square in front of the memorial to the founder of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky, lay the mutilated corpses of members of what was now the KGB. The building itself had so far remained inviolate. The secret police knew what awaited them and were putting up a spirited defence. Anti-aircraft guns towed along from various parts of the city rained shells into the windows but those within refused to give themselves up.

  Then, above the block of the Lyubyanka, a column of smoke rose up to the sky. The heads of the KGB, like the members of the Politburo, had abandoned the building and made their way to safe hiding in the Metro through a secret underground passage. The fate of ordinary officers left to beat back the pressure of the crowd was no concern of theirs. Before leaving they had set fire to the building from within, to destroy the archives. The fire spread with amazing rapidity. There were plenty of documents to feed it. One thousand Chekists now found themselves caught in a rat-trap. Flames raged in the corridors, but the windows on the lower stories were secured by substantial grilles. It was only possible to jump from the second floor, from the burning windows straight down on to the asphalt below. Legs were broken in the fall but this was of minor consequence. The crowd trampled on those who fell, stoned them, beat in their skulls.

  “Put out the fire!” came the cry. “Put it out! There are millions of names there of people we want. Save the archives!”

  Too late. The floors and roof were well alight. Staircases and ceilings fell in. Well, perhaps the safes would survive. We'll sort it out afterwards and square up accounts somehow.

  From the Lyubyanka to the Old Square a huge crowd was now milling. There was something even more interesting going on there. This was the location of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, in several blocks, solidly built and united into one large building complex with hundreds of kilometres of corridors. There were even more people here than at the Lyubyanka, though those buildings were older perhaps, more solidly built, and well armed.

  The thousands of inmates of the Central Committee building saw they had no option. They gave themselves up without a fight. A security guard was hurriedly formed from amongst the crowd to preserve what could be saved from the archives. Then, in several places on the square, the officials and security police were lined up and executed in turn after a brief pretence at trial. There were not enough guns, not enough rope, nor even in the event enough electric cable. The executions were carried out when all else failed with firemen's axes, or the officials were simply bludgeoned to death or thrown down from the windows or rooftops. White and shaking men who had only the day before been holding their own country and almost half the world by the throat came creeping out. They were all lined up and made to await their punishment.

  There was laughter in the gloating crowd. “Now it’s your turn to queue. You lot have never had to wait in a queue. You can do it now!”

  Meanwhile at the Lyubyanka a heavy tractor had fixed a hawser round Iron Felix, the statue of Dzerzhinsky. He soon came crashing down on to the corpses of those who were the successors of his Cheka, startling a flock of ravens, who flew up croaking into a sky darkened by the smoke from burning buildings.

  There was swift and cruel vengeance everywhere, bitter retribution and a bloodstained payment of account. But there was still no food. “

  Chapter 23: A New World

  One of the main preoccupations of the United States authorities in the very rapid planning which they had undertaken about the future of the Soviet forces and the Soviet empire had been to assume control and possession of the nuclear weapons remaining in Soviet hands. The regrouping of Soviet divisions which occurred at Omsk and Khabarovsk was authorized by the Allied authorities only on the conditi
on that all nuclear weapons in the possession of these forces were handed over to American teams sent in for the purpose. Other small American task forces operated dispersed over Soviet Asia searching for and taking possession of, by force if necessary, the weapons still held by units which had scattered throughout the vast expanse of Siberia. The Americans and Chinese met by prior arrangement at the Soviet missile testing ground, which was not, in fact, at Bykonor in Kazakhstan, as was always publicly put out by Soviet disinformation services, but not very far away at Tyuratam. The decision was taken to set up a group of experts to make a common study of the relevant Soviet technology. They also agreed that nuclear material on the site should be removed for disposal rather than incorporated in the nuclear forces of either party. This agreement symbolized American acceptance of the fact that they could not hope for the de-nuclearization of China. They were certainly in no position to enforce it. Since they did not believe that the present Chinese regime would make use of nuclear weapons in a manner contrary to the interests of the United States or of world peace, they were content to make a virtue of necessity.

  The situation was, however, quite different with regard to other possessors or possible possessors of nuclear weapons. The Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 had failed in its object of restricting the possession of nuclear weapons to the five powers possessing them in the 1960s (the USA, Soviet Union, UK, France and China) and there was reasonable evidence to support the view that others had them or had the capability of making them at short notice. The most certain candidates for inclusion in this group were Iraq, Pakistan, India, South Africa, Israel. Libya might have attempted to purchase one with its oil money but could now be happily struck off the list. The others, however, still represented the danger of a possible use of these weapons in the local quarrels which were only too likely to continue after the general war came to an end.

  There seemed to be a small window of opportunity in the excitement and euphoria of the Soviet collapse in which America and the West could compel rather than persuade others to accept the total extension of non-proliferation. Here again it was possible to direct the enthusiasm of the nuclear disarmers in the West into more fruitful channels now that the absurd claim could be dropped that unilateral disarmament in the West would 'encourage' the USSR to follow suit. It could be much more plausibly represented that the renunciation of nuclear weapons by Britain and France would provide much improved moral justification for imposing such renunciation on other possessors, actual or potential, of these weapons. Even so, this was too difficult for everyone to swallow all at once and the Americans had to be content with a solemn and binding promise that the nuclear weapons of Britain and France would be phased out over a period of ten years (thus just avoiding the necessity for Britain to complete the distressingly expensive purchase of the Trident system) on condition that other countries concerned renounced all intention to produce nuclear weapons and allowed the facilities that existed for this purpose to be destroyed under international supervision. Proposals to this effect were put to possible nuclear powers with the clear intimation that if they refused to agree, the facilities in their territories would be destroyed, probably by air attack, but with any other military action thought to be necessary. This they would clearly be in no position to resist.

  Apart from the one overriding necessity of making the world comparatively safe from nuclear warfare for another generation, the Western allies generally resisted the temptation to play God except where this seemed unavoidable. In Europe, despite the ruined areas, there has been real hope that we are witnessing the construction of some sort of European community from the Atlantic to the Urals. In this region there has been a note of innovation, excitement, enthusiasm and intellectual daring - an attractive throwback to the European spirit of the late 1950s which had seemed to be sleeping since. This is not to say that the road to an allied extended Europe is likely to be smooth.

  The worries being felt by the five Atlantic powers of Europe's far west - Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and Ireland - were well summarized in the views of a prominent member of the new coalition government in Britain, in a brilliant speech at Harvard soon after the end of the war.

  In what is now generally known as the Harvard 'Address', this thoughtful, perhaps heretical, British politician told an American audience that for some time before the war many Europeans had seen a degree of stability - precarious but precious - in a world in rough balance between two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States. Now one of the two superpowers had gone, but it was unlikely that the whole globe would wish- to live for ever under a single pax Americana. The burden of world domination today was certainly too heavy for any one country to bear, and there would be constant revolts if any country tried to take it on.

  It would therefore be greatly to America's advantage, and good for everybody's peace of mind, that there should soon be either two or three friendly superpowers again. As the unorthodox British politician put it, 'The President of the United States should be hell-bent on the dissolution of the unintended American empire.' If there were two superpowers, most people would guess they would be the United States and the Japan-China co-prosperity sphere, facing each other (one trusts in amity) across the Pacific Ocean.

  There were much greater attractions in this possibility than there had been in the pre-war system where the two superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union faced each other in some enmity with Western Europe in between. But if the centre of the world were to move to the aptly named Pacific, with one of the two superpowers on each side of it, said the British politician, 'this would have some disadvantages, both for us in Europe and for you on this east coast of these United States.'

  The main disadvantage of 'this east coast' of the United States was that it was already enormously attractive to live in California, if only because of the weather (the speaker looked out on the driving snow of Massachusetts in January). If the Pacific were now to become the ocean across which passed most of advanced world trade, the pull to California would become much greater. 'There is a danger that this east coast may become a depressed area in North America.'

  That had serious implications for Europe, on 'the other side of our Atlantic millpond'. For the first time in its history, there was a danger that Europe, in the new Pacific century, could become isolated from the centre of the world. It was therefore greatly to the advantage of all eastern Americans, and of all people in the United States who valued the European heritage, that Europe should become the third new superpower.

  Europe would not quickly become a coherent superpower. At best it would be a confederation that was 'untidy and not at all well-organized but very well meaning'. At worst there were two dangers in this Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals which might be called the danger at the peripheries and the danger at the centre.

  The trouble at the peripheries was that the Urals were at present the border between Western civilization and an eastern part of the old Soviet Union where new and uncertain structures had to be created out of a chaotic void. 'It is not a comfortable posture for any new European superpower to have one foot on these Urals and one on an Atlantic Ocean that may be about to become a waterway through a depressed area.'

  The danger at the centre of the new Europe was one that diplomatic people were less willing to talk about, but it should be brought out into the open. 'With all respect to the great German people, who have behaved better, since 1945, than any European people except the Poles have done for centuries, there are worries on my continent about the emergence of a reunited and thus possibly re-Prussianized Germany.

  'It is important for us in the EEC to see that the sort of Europe we rebuild should not be one liable to tribal wars. The rest of Europe, both East and West, will be frightened if the two Germanies unite. They would then form too dominant a European power. It is important that each Germany should be a member of the EEC, and be united within the EEC to the same degree that France and West Germany are, but no mor
e than that. The same applies to all the former communist states, including the European states of the former Soviet Union. This is how we must build our new Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.'

  In fact, German reunification was not the only alternative option. The Germans had to choose whether they would, as two separate countries, West and East Germany, be members of the enlarged European Community on the same basis as the other participants, or whether they would see a more interesting future as the protagonists of a revived Mittel-Europa based on German industry, technology and finance, and extending through Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia into the Ukraine and the Balkans, perhaps even so far as to participate in Turkey's potential resources of manpower, raw materials and food in the south.

  The arguments for Mittel-Europa were compelling from a historical point of view. What had never been quite achieved with the Berlin-Baghdad railway project before the First World War, or the push to the Caucasus in 1942, was the challenge to the German nation - now two-headed, like its former imperial eagle. This solution would avoid much complication and committee work. German leadership would be uncontested, unlike the give and take (which so often seemed to be 'Germans give and others take') in the convoluted negotiations of the Community. On the other side there was the attraction of the wider world, the creation of an element in a world system equivalent at least in economic power to the United States and China-Japan. As with most politicians and diplomats, the Germans naturally hoped to have the best of both these systems, and hoped also that they need not be mutually exclusive alternatives. So, at the time of our writing, the much enlarged European Community is in process of formation. Within it the two German states are making good their claim to be the leaders in a joint, and not yet exclusive, Drang nach Osten.