The Third World War: August 1985

by John Hackett

  CHAPTER 24: The Nuclear Decision

  As the Soviet offensive ground to a halt in Europe and the war at sea emphasized not only the geographical disadvantages of the Soviet Union as a naval power but also the misdirection of its efforts to overcome them, various signs of political instability began to appear, both inside and outside the Kremlin. The purpose of the war had after all been largely political — to exploit the conventional weakness of the West in order to humiliate the US and to re-establish absolutism in Eastern Europe as the only safeguard against dissidence and fragmentation. The very statement of these war aims demonstrated the hollowness and imbalance of Soviet power. The military machine had been built up to an unparalleled size to buttress a political performance which was almost uniformly unsuccessful. The Soviet Union had been unable to take part in genuine detente because the appeal of Soviet communism to the masses either inside or outside the Soviet Union had proved mainly negative. Force, or the threat of force, had been necessary to counter the greater political attractiveness of the West and fissiparous tendencies within the Warsaw Pact. Political cohesion had failed to develop in Eastern Europe. Even the approach to power of communist parties in the West had not increased Soviet influence there; it had merely set an example of dissidence for communist countries in the East.

  In 1956 in Hungary and in 1968 in Czechoslovakia Soviet military power had sufficed to restore political situations which were escaping from Soviet control. In 1985 the Soviet military machine proved just inadequate to extend Soviet political control in south-east Europe and over West Germany. One of the major objectives of this effort had been to master the general unease and insubordination of the governments and peoples of Eastern Europe. The attainment of this objective would have required quick and decisive victories in Yugoslavia and in Germany. The check which in fact occurred was enough, even without actual defeat, to allow pent-up political forces to burst out. The leaders of the former satellite countries, and very soon the leaders of the Soviet Union itself, began to realize that military force no longer provided a sovereign remedy for political dissent. Military stalemate would not only allow the greater potential resources of the West to be mobilized; it would also foster revolution in the East, just as it had in 1917.

  Foreseeing the dangers of disintegration in the Warsaw Pact and disaffection at home, the Soviet policy-makers split once more: the hawks became cataclysmic, the doves were for return to Mother Russia. The former argued that while the conventional battle had not gone quite according to plan this had always been only one element in the total strategy. The nuclear weaponry remained intact. Better to have some mutual destruction than creeping political decay and forcible decolonization. The very backwardness of large areas of the Soviet Union would allow it to survive better than the USA after a nuclear exchange. Besides, there were enough warheads to target some on China as well and so put off that menace for another generation, with negligible risk of Chinese retaliation. Also, if they were really prepared to go to these lengths there was a good chance of a deal with the United States before the major destruction took place. They could, for example, carry out one or more nuclear attacks on targets in Europe to show they meant business, and at the same time propose to the United States a bilateral status quo and the division of the world into two spheres of influence. The two superpowers had more interests in common than either had with its allies. It would pay each of them for Europe to stay divided and for the Middle East to be kept in order by both, acting together. Either could deal with China, provided the other kept out.

  It was a persuasive picture, but reports from Eastern Europe and from the constituent republics of the Soviet Union, which were growing in volume, were already lending support to a contrary thesis put forward by the doves. The Poles as usual led the way. With the outbreak of war the Soviet Union had re-imposed its own control in Poland, working through the Polish ministries and the apparatus of the police. This only served to stimulate resistance, which is a natural habit of mind in a people who have been oppressed for 200 years by larger neighbours.

  Meanwhile, the Western Allies were hastily continuing their by no means fruitless efforts to reactivate the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and SOE (Special Operations Executive) and improve liaison with resistance groups. In the confusion of the turning-point battle in Germany a Polish armoured unit in the north deliberately let itself be overrun by the advancing Americans, which provided a breakthrough for Western intelligence and an invaluable nucleus for a further liaison network. The West for some time tried to play the old themes of 1939-45, but in fact the grounds for revolt this time were rather different. The basic aims in Poland and elsewhere were to get the Soviet Union off their backs, to get enough to eat, and to find their own way to whatever political future they might choose. This did not necessarily imply rejection of a communist future, but only, and most decidedly, of the Soviet way of achieving it. For a society aiming at middle-class consumer values the dictatorship of the proletariat was in any case rather an out-of-date concept. But what was really intolerable was the dictatorship of the Soviet proletariat, as represented by the Soviet Politburo and the KGB.

  As the more acute observers in the West had foreseen, the phenomenon of Euro-communism was proving far more lethal to the Soviet empire than to Western capitalism. The oppressed nationalities of Eastern Europe, and in the Soviet Union itself, were not blind to the defects of Western society in general. They did not all aspire to have their economies run by US multi-national companies any more than by Soviet planners. The idea which inspired them was that of a society based at one and the same time both on national freedom and on socialist principle. Once the Soviet offensive in Europe stalled an opportunity began to open up for asserting this approach. There was not much combination between the various national movements, but the fact that so many of them both in Europe and in Asia felt the same urge to national independence, and started moving at the same time, turned a few local outbreaks into what was to become an irresistible revolt.

  Disaffection achieved a cumulative momentum of its own. In addition to the growing resistance in Eastern Europe, the stirrings of nationalist revolt in Central Asia fomented by the Chinese made it unsafe for the Soviet General Staff to rely on units which contained a high proportion of soldiers from those areas. A larger number of reliable units had to be sent eastwards from military districts which could be properly called Russian. This left fewer troops for internal security in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. There they had to watch not only the civilian population but the local army units as well, the loyalty of whose rank and file to the Soviet command became every day more doubtful. The resistance was not, as in the Second World War, that of an underground movement against the authorities; the authorities themselves began to resist the pressures and directives of the Soviet civil and military hierarchies. This showed itself principally in the failure to maintain communications through Poland between the Soviet Union and East Germany. Railways and roads were sabotaged, thus gravely hampering forward movement of second and third echelon formations and of munitions, as well as the delivery of food and manufactures from Poland to the USSR. The Polish authorities proved singularly unable to find those responsible. Attempts by Soviet forces to do so directly not only tied up still more units which could have been better used elsewhere, but led to the first incidents of urban guerrilla fighting directed against the billets and movements of Soviet garrisons.

  Russia had been successful in previous conflicts, against Napoleon and against Hitler, because of three priceless assets: unlimited space, apparently unlimited manpower and the willingness of Russians to be led into frightful sacrifice for the defence of the motherland. Now, everything was reversed. It was no good retreating into the vast interior space of Eurasia when this would merely consolidate the ring of states, not all friendly, which was forming out of the fragments of an empire. And manpower was no longer wholly reliable. The men who came from subject territories were less willing to be sacrifice
d in order to maintain alien rule on neighbouring countries. Soviet manpower was at the same time intolerably overstretched by national revolt against the Soviet Union on two fronts as well as by resistance to the gathering Western forces in Germany and by the requirement to face a potential Chinese threat.

  The threat in the east was not seen primarily in military terms. The Soviet superiority in equipment and experience still seemed enough to compensate for greater Chinese numbers. Nuclear preponderance still lay with the USSR, though how long this would continue into the future was doubtful. The threat was once again not to Soviet Russia’s military strength, but to her political weakness. The peoples who now formed the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union had been conquered or absorbed in the nineteenth century in a great surge of colonialist expansion to the east and south. Russia had been drawn forward in an age of competitive imperialism by rivalry with Britain, pushing north and west from India, and the opportunity to take advantage of the weakness of China. The Russians had been in some ways more successful and more ruthless than the British. The north-west frontier of India remained a battle-ground for the British and British-Indian armies up to the end of British rule in India in the mid-twentieth century. Russia had liquidated similar tribal opposition in Georgia and the Caucasus before the end of the nineteenth. Even more remarkably, Russian control over enormous areas of Asia and many millions of non-Russian subjects survived not only the transition from Tsarism to Bolshevism, but also the break-up of Western empires in Asia, which might have been expected to set a dangerous example to the republics of the Soviet Union in Central Asia.

  Now, however, there was a new factor. It was the growing strength and prosperity of China. Up to the 1970s China had not proved an attractive force. The Chinese had suppressed the Moslems in Sinkiang no less brutally than the Russians in Tashkent and Alma Ata. The material rewards of Chinese communism had been even less satisfying than membership of the Soviet Union. Now, however, co-prosperity was changing the material balance, and the Chinese were using the minorities on their side of the border to infiltrate and influence those on the other. Apart from offers of greater economic well-being, there were arguments closer to the heart of Soviet doctrine which could be turned against their authors. It had long been an essential element of Soviet policy and propaganda that ‘peaceful co-existence’ included the support of movements, even wars, of national liberation. These had up till now been far away, in Africa or South-east Asia; but why, it was now asked, should not the same principle apply to the nations of the Uzbeks and Kazakhs? Had not the Soviet constitution provided for the secession of the constituent republics if these should ever wish it? Had not the moment come, at this time in an unsuccessful war, when such aspirations might begin to be realized?

  For the time being the Communist Party apparatus and the secret police were strong enough to keep such movements in check. But their existence was enough to add powerfully to the worries of the central authorities, and to sharpen the arguments between those who thought the crisis should be heightened as a means of restoring order and obedience, and those who wanted to draw back from the over-extension which had already led Soviet Russia into so many troubles.

  The Kremlin doves, who called themselves realists, used all these facts and all these arguments against the superpower status quo thesis of the nuclear hard-liners. What good would it do to get the United States to recognize a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and Siberia when the Soviet regime was no longer able to exert its influence in those areas? Even if the forces now facing NATO remained immune to reduction by agreement with the West there would still not be enough to hold down the previously subject peoples. Better to accept facts as they were, and to recognize the errors of a gigantism inherited from Tsarist dreams of empire and from the illusions of world revolution of some of the early Bolsheviks. (It was still impermissible to criticize Lenin by name.) Russian greatness had always been less of material things than of the spirit. Moreover, the pure doctrines of communism had been distorted by the needs of empire. Far from withering away, the state had been obliged to intensify its presence and its pervasiveness. Russians might be better off alone, without the lesser breeds whom they were finding it increasingly hard to keep in subordination.

  On the Western side another argument raged almost as fiercely, though without the personally lethal outcome common to argument in the Kremlin. To invade or not to invade was the question. US reinforcements were now flooding in, the sea routes were more or less assured, the European Allies had recovered and regrouped. French participation had been an enormous source of strength. Evidence of Soviet disarray was seen at every hand. Why not now go over to the offensive, it was asked, and finish off for ever the threat from Eastern Europe, so that everyone could live happily ever after? There was no need to repeat Hitler’s mistake and go too far. No Lebensraum was now required. East Germany and Poland could be freed and the advance could be pushed forward in the Ukraine as far as the Dnieper. Control of the Ukrainian harvest and of the Dnieper hydro-electric installations would be enough to cripple any further war effort by Soviet Russia. It would be tempting to go on and liberate Georgia and control Baku, but that might be counterproductive in the long run as it would expose too long a line of Western communications, with the need for garrisons to secure them, and repeat in the East the Soviet error in the West.

  This line of argument, propounded largely by the more influential US commanders, was supported by those who thought in terms of land masses and geo-politics. But there was one element in it which ran foul of European political instincts and political fears. The first stage in this advance would obviously be to free East Germany from Soviet control and to occupy it with Western forces, among whom West Germans would be preponderant. Could it really be believed, asked the French, the British and the smaller Western Allies, that this would not result in Germany being reunited? In the cold war years of the 1950s the reunification of Germany had been a parrot-cry of Western governments. Many Europeans had gone along with this line only because they were fairly sure that nothing of the sort would happen. It seemed at the time a useful stick with which to beat the Russians and a useful carrot to hold out to the West Germans to bring them more closely into the Western Alliance. But it was not a genuine long-term aim, except to very few. Many of the more thoughtful Germans themselves had misgivings about what a reunited Germany might be like, and what effect it would have on its neighbours. They might be fairly confident that West Germany at least had profoundly changed and would not allow a reunited Germany to become an aggressive force again, but they saw equally clearly that others would not feel the same confidence in their pacific intentions; in contrast to the dawning hopes of reconciliation in Western Europe through the Economic Community a reunited Germany might start the same old dreary cycle of national antagonisms all over again. These views had received little expression in Germany, but there had certainly been an almost audible sigh of relief when Willi Brandt, with an act of supreme statesmanship, entered upon the Ostpolitik in the 1960s, and to all intents and purposes renounced reunification as an aim of German policy for the foreseeable future.

  Now, with the road to Berlin more or less open, the temptation was there. So, in even greater measure, was the fear and suspicion. There were some in the West German army who would find it hard to resist an opportunity to support an East German rising against Soviet occupation, and to knock down once and for all the hated Berlin wall and the frontier watch towers. The German command were doubtful as to how far they would be able to hold back all their units if this sort of opportunity presented itself. The French, British, Belgians, Dutch and Norwegians, on the other hand, refused absolutely to agree to a move forward beyond the West German border.

  In addition to their fears of a united Germany, even one dominated by West Germany, they argued persuasively that an offensive into Soviet territory would be the one thing which might not only revive the Soviet will and capability to resist, but also spur them
on, out of desperation, to make use of their still intact nuclear armoury. America might count on a measure of survival in such an event; the outlook for Western Europe would be far grimmer. Let the Western forces rather stand on the side lines, the argument ran, and watch the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, assisted by such covert stimulus as they could give, in Poland and elsewhere, to national resistance.

  There was another actor in this drama which the protagonists were apt to overlook. East German opinion had long been among the most suppressed and distorted in Eastern Europe. The failure of the Soviet offensive with the subsequent ferment in Poland and the eastern republics, at last gave back a voice to those who had perforce been silent for so long. The apparatchiks of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland (SED) were brushed aside and a real debate began to make itself heard, among academics, technicians, managers and army officers, in fact among all those professionals who, in spite of Soviet ideological interference, had kept the state running and made its industry a formidable factor in the world. Their opinions were not exactly what might have been expected in the West, or in the East. They did not clamour to join their democratic brothers west of the Elbe; they saw little joy in a united Germany controlled by West German bankers in the sole interest of economic growth. They found the conformism and hierarchies of the West almost as stifling as their own. They saw a better future in a state with some of the old Prussian virtues which they had assimilated into their own system: frugality, a certain puritanism, a feeling of superiority towards their neighbours on each side — a conviction that they were more advanced than the Slavs on the east and morally superior to the mixed economies in the West, already, in East German eyes, showing symptoms of decadence.