The Third World War - The Untold Story

by Sir John Hackett

  The option of reunifying the two Germanies was rejected largely from considerations of West German politics. The Christian Democrats were the largest party in 1985 and, though not members of the governing coalition, had a blocking vote in the Bundesrat. It was at first supposed that they would be the party most in favour of reunifying West and East Germany. This supposition proved wrong.

  As East Germany moved towards its first democratic elections in late 1986, the public opinion polls suggested that the so-called Freedom Party would probably win. This had connections with the Catholic Church as well as some Protestant evangelists. The Christian Democrats in Bonn originally assumed that it would be an ally of theirs. A visit to the Freedom Party by a prominent West German academic provided the following rather unexpected report to the Christian Democrat party machine.

  'The population of East Germany is accustomed to living standards under one-half of those in the Bundesrepublik. If the two Germanies unite, we will be importing seventeen million proletarians into our system.

  'Although all East Germans hate communism, the Freedom Party is by our standards socialist. Its idea of economic democracy is that workers' councils have the main say in how to run factories. The folk heroes there are the old Solidarity trade unionists in Poland. Even the Catholic Church glorifies them.

  'The only two features of East German life which are more advanced than in the Bundesrepublik are the provision of public sports facilities and free health care. If East Germany joins with West Germany we will almost certainly have to proceed to socialist medicine and a wider-ranging pattern of government expenditure. In this, most East Germans will vote with the political left in the Bundesrepublik.

  'It should also be realized that, even after forty years in a different system, some East Germans are anxious to get back to the old Prussian virtues of frugality, a sort of puritanism and a feeling of superiority towards neighbours on either side. They feel they are more advanced than the Slavs to their east, and morally superior in some ways to us decadent Rhinelanders to their west. This could introduce philosophies into our Bavarian and Rhineland way of life which most of us were rather relieved to jettison in 1945.'

  It was fairly clear that the Christian Democrat Party in West Germany was not going to be over-keen on reunification.

  Irrespective of the larger structure that might encompass central and eastern Europe, in the form of an enlarged Community, or, less probably, a German oriented Mittel-Europa, there were clearly going to be local tensions to be resolved and local scores to be settled. Like other empires, the Soviet empire had largely suppressed old quarrels and rivalries in the territory which it dominated. With its removal, the Czechs and Slovaks, for example, were more conscious of their differences than of the need for Czechoslovak unity; Hungary and Romania were inclined to flex their muscles about Transylvania, largely inhabited by a Hungarian minority; Poland prepared to renew dormant territorial disputes with the Ukraine and Lithuania. This was reminiscent of the break-up of the British Indian empire into two, then three, warring countries, or the civil war in Nigeria, or the confusion in Indochina following French and then American withdrawal. Events in Czechoslovakia were the first to precipitate a change in the old order.

  The collapse of the Soviet regime left the Czechoslovaks unable to rely, as the Poles could, upon a self-confident leadership to pick up the reins of government, though the country was still far from the total confusion prevailing at the same time in the GDR. Their leaders believed - rightly or wrongly time alone will show - that a split into two more homogeneous parts would help to solve the many problems that freedom brought with it. So Czechia and Slovakia set themselves up as two separate states. In the eighteen months which have elapsed they have not been able to do much more than hold constituent assemblies and draft terms for new elections in each. Industrial production, down to near zero in the autumn of 1985, has picked up somewhat, but the disastrous central European harvest of that same year has left the Czechs and Slovaks no less dependent on food supplies from the Americas and Australasia than the people of other former European clients of Soviet Russia.

  The year 1986 was one of unprecedented flourishing for the Hungarian economy. This country, whilst still under Soviet hegemony, had managed to move away from socialism, to reduce the intervention of its bureaucrats in the economy, and to renounce state subsidies in industry and in agriculture. The Hungarian economy developed swiftly, following the laws of competition rather than state planning and regulations. As soon as the war ended, Hungary made rapid progress in improving the wellbeing of its population. The Government introduced the lowest taxes in Europe and abolished all state intervention in economic problems. This caused an economic boom and an unprecedented influx of capital. The temptation to exploit success was too great and in the summer Hungarian forces attempted a rapid movement into Romania, with the classic objective of protecting the Hungarian minority in Transylvania who had been transferred to Romanian sovereignty in 1919. Only partial success was achieved, in spite of Romania's simultaneous trouble on another front.

  In the remains of the dismembered Soviet Union itself, the approaching winter of 1985 looked like being a savage one. In many parts order had completely broken down. Marauding bands dominated huge tracts of country searching for food. Ethnic groups, driven by necessity, were banding together for their own survival. Soldiers returning to their homes, often with weapons and sometimes in organized units and formations, if they did not turn to banditry were forming local defence forces. Centres of order slowly began to emerge.

  For the Western allies the occupation and administration of all that huge hinterland was quite out of the question. It was essential, however, to establish secure areas both as refuges and as nuclei of civil government. These were set up initially in Petrograd (no time was lost in shedding the hated patronym of the source of so much evil), Moscow, Archangel, Odessa, Smolensk, and in the vicinity of Gorki and Kuybyshev on the Volga. Each secure area was the responsibility of one Allied division, operating with an organization strong in infantry and specialist troops (particularly in engineers, communications, logistics and transportation) but not in heavy weapons. A Control Headquarters at the level of an army group was established in Petrograd, which swiftly became the capital of the North Russian Republic, soon also incorporating Novgorod and adopting in its entirety Novgorod's ancient code of laws. The Control HQ, set up in the first instance by NATO in late September 1985, passed under the control of the United Nations, where it still rests.

  The most pressing problem was the provision and distribution of food, which was immediately taken in hand under the United Nations in an operation of unprecedented magnitude. The full co-operation of all nations was most urgently sought, and in nearly all cases very generously given. Due to the short duration of the war and the relatively restricted areas of high damage, most of the economies of the world were still functioning almost normally. Surpluses which had been an embarrassment to the EEC were now of the highest value. The worst aspects of famine were avoided in the former territory of the Soviet Union, but not by a wide margin and shortages in the more important foodstuffs still continue even now to cause concern.

  It is not the business of this book to explore every detail of the slow and often painful evolution of the successor states to the Soviet Union. But as pieces in a vast and complex jigsaw puzzle the fate of Moscow and the early evolution of the Ukraine, Belorussia and the Moslem Central Asians may be mentioned.

  Moscow raised special problems. It was a natural rallying point for the criminal, the violent, the rejected - the undesirable in any form. A quadripartite system was established, not greatly dissimilar, except in one important respect, to that set up in Berlin in 1945 with United States, Soviet Russian, British and French participation. The difference between Berlin in 1945 and Moscow forty years later was in the origin of the security forces involved. Instead of contingents from the four powers, as in Berlin, troops of the former Red Army were used, drawn from
3 Shock Army, which, under General Ryzanov, had earlier defected to the West.

  By comparison the Ukraine was almost a success story. This newly independent republic now ranked with Great Britain, France and West Germany in terms of area, size of population and economic development. The Ukrainian National Assembly lost no time in proclaiming a constitution for the new state, in which it was declared that the economic freedom of the people was the basic principle of political freedom. A man cannot be politically free if his livelihood depends on the state, the trade union or a monopoly association. At its first congress the National Assembly passed laws forbidding state intervention in the private lives of the country's citizens and in the economy. In addition, laws were passed against the emergence of monopolies and trade unions with more than 10,000 members. The first benefit of free enterprise was felt in agriculture, and the Ukraine set out on the way to resume its position as one of the world's chief suppliers of agricultural produce.

  All was not sweetness and light however. The western provinces, whose population was Roman Catholic, were demanding autonomy. Groups of Crimean Tartars, deported from the Crimea at the end of the Second World War by Stalin's security forces, had begun to return to their homeland. They too declared that they did not want to remain part of the Ukraine. A new knot of contradictions was beginning. Moreover, Poland claimed its rights to the part of Ukrainian territory at the centre of which lies the town of Lvov, and a border conflict threatened to break out.

  The neighbouring republic of Moldavia had been incorporated into Romania, but here again a border clash arose between the Ukraine and Romania. Both countries considered the Dniester delta and the town of Odessa as their own territory. On the night of 13 July 1986 two tank divisions and three motor rifle divisions of the newly-formed Ukrainian People's Army made a surprise attack on Moldavia and seized the town of Kishinev. The Ukrainian Government demanded that Romania renounce all claims to Odessa and to the Dniester lowlands in exchange for which the Ukraine would remove its forces from Moldavia.

  The fate of Belorussia turned out more tragically. Its capital, Minsk, had perished in the nuclear catastrophe, and with it many of those who might have taken a lead in bringing the state to successful independence. There was not a single political party, group or movement capable of taking power into its own hands. The western Catholic part of Belorussia indicated its wish to rejoin Poland. The eastern part remained independent, but there was a strong tendency among the refugees returning from the army and other parts of the Soviet Union to feel that they should become part of Russia in order to preserve their orthodox religion and national traditions, no matter what the political regime in Russia might be. Otherwise the whole country might be seized by Poland and converted to Catholicism. The trouble was that Russia did not exist. In the place where Russia had been there was confusion and widespread fighting, often approaching a state of civil war.

  As one further example of the myriad difficulties arising from the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Cossacks presented, and continue to present, a problem. They form a distinct nation of Slavonic origin, dispersed in several widely separated localities. There are groups, for example, on the Don and the Kuban, in the Caucasus, in Astrakhan and Siberia, forming eleven separate tribal districts. It is by no means yet clear how these groups, which cannot be physically co-located, can be associated with successor states in their vicinity, whether in one form of association or several different forms. An Allied mission is at present established with each one.

  Before moving on to the rather separate fate of Central Asia it may be appropriate to reflect that whatever problems the collapse of the Soviet regime may have solved, many others have rushed in to fill the resultant empty spaces. There are inevitably those who argue now (as some even argued before) that to struggle along in a world divided by the rivalries of two superpowers doing whatever was possible to smooth the rough edges at the interface made more sense than to try to resolve the situation by the destruction of one of them. Had the USSR offered any convincing gesture of willingness to accept peaceful co-existence the Soviet Union might still be a great power today. It did not because it could not. Acceptance of the legitimacy of capitalist democracy was a contradiction wholly intolerable to the Marxist-Leninist ideology. The rugged strength developed by the structure in its sixty-eight years of life made sure that when it was destroyed by its own weaknesses it would go down, as it did, in a bloodbath of terrifying magnitude.

  The problems left behind are still with us, some brought into being by the disappearance of Soviet imperialism, others existing before, but now made greater still. We have at least been spared the worst on two major counts.

  The first, of transcendental importance, is our almost miraculous escape from total nuclear war. Some say it was never very likely anyway, since it would have led to something approaching so close to annihilation for either side that both were determined to avoid it. Others do not agree and argue that given the unpredictability of human behaviour under stress it could very easily have happened.

  The second was that the US had, at last, learned the lesson it ignored, with disastrous consequences, in the Second World War -that war must never be waged except to a clear political end. The American approach had been that a war was to be fought by the military, to whom the politicians deferred until the war was won. Politics then once more took over and the President could turn from being primarily Commander-in-Chief to the resumption of his other and more important functions as head of government and head of state.

  The overriding and very nearly the sole consideration in war, under this approach, was the defeat of the enemy in the field at minimum cost in American life. Nothing else mattered nearly so much. Eisenhower was therefore halted on the Elbe in 1945 to let the Soviet steamroller drive on into Berlin. Patton was within a day's march of Prague when he too was halted, again to let the Soviets do the job. Meanwhile Alexander in Italy, in spite of Churchill's strong opposition, had been deprived, in order to mount a futile Allied operation on the French Riviera, of the troops which would have got him safely, before the Russians, to Vienna. Berlin, Prague, Vienna -all gifts to Stalin from the United States, gifts which paved the way to Soviet imperial dominance of Eastern Europe, and helped to make a Third World War inevitable.

  Whether or not US policies can be described as fully effective in the disordered world left by the collapse of Soviet imperialism in 1985, at least the lesson had now been learnt that post-war policies deserve most serious consideration not only before hostilities end but even before they begin. This is only one of many important lessons learned by policy makers in the United States over the years. Another, too recent to be fully evaluated, was the result of events in the Caribbean and Central America, events in which the United States could have lost the war in Europe before it began, and which have been described in chapter 16.

  East of the Urals the collapse of central authority left about half the land mass of Asia in a state of high confusion. The centres of influence consisted of the important towns along the Trans-Siberian railway and the ancient cities of Central Asia and the remains of Soviet commands with such forces as had continued at their disposal. After urgent action had been taken to obtain control of the nuclear weapons left in the hands of the Soviet forces, two factors dominated the problem of what was to become of this enormous area and the many millions of its inhabitants.

  First was the question of China's intentions with regard to what were traditionally described as frontier rectifications: how much territory would China attempt to get back, claiming that it had been surrendered by unequal treaties in the past? Secondly, there were the autonomist movements based on the ethnic character of the majority of the inhabitants in southern Central Asia. But it was still unclear whether they would wish and would be able to take advantage of the sudden collapse of Soviet control to establish independent states based on their national affiliations and on the Moslem religion.

  Events had moved so fast in the latter
part of the campaign in Europe that there had not been much time for concerted planning by the Western allies about the future of Russia in Asia. In the Second World War there had, after all, been at least two years of joint negotiation and planning between the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom about the future arrangements for Europe, including the division of Germany into zones of occupation. It could be said that the results were not brilliant from the Western point of view. Nevertheless, there had been time to codify the often conflicting interests of the participants and arrive at a system which was well known to them all at the end of hostilities and so avoid an armed struggle for territory and influence between victorious Allies. This was not the case in the Far East in 1985, when there had only been the most rapid and sketchy conversations between the United States and China, on a highly secret and hypothetical basis, in the months immediately preceding the outbreak of the Third World War.

  As a result of the enormous difference between the political and administrative systems of the United States and China the discussions had to begin at a very basic level and a lot of misunderstandings had to be cleared out of the way before it was possible to get down to bedrock and talk about realities on the ground. This meant that the agreement had to be limited to a very few basic considerations and the edges had to be left fuzzy. Moreover, there were precedents that, on the Western side at least, should be avoided. Yalta was etched in the minds of those who had personal recollection of the disasters which it had inflicted on central Europe and this acted as a grave warning against the precipitate carving up of other people's lands and other people's loyalties. On this occasion the conditions were more favourable, which led to a greater possibility of agreement that might meet the requirements of both sides. Neither China nor America was aiming at world domination and neither was seriously worried about being attacked by the other - two important factors which were lacking in the negotiations with the Soviet Union at Yalta and at other wartime conferences.