The Third World War - The Untold Story

by Sir John Hackett

  The disintegration of the Soviet Union had removed the greatest threat against China. The size of China was already enormous. It was doubtful whether a single government could indefinitely control a billion people. There was no obvious advantage in gaining some millions more by extending the frontiers to the north and west. Moreover, the demographic situation was more or less under control in China so that there was no insatiable land hunger. If a certain deference could be paid to history, respect for which had survived the cultural revolution, and some lands which had historically belonged to China could be reunited with it, there might well be a basis for a fairly reasonable settlement which included a renunciation of further major expansion. On the other hand, the smaller states of East and South-East Asia were going to be in some fear of Chinese intentions and would need American reassurance or guarantee.

  As far as military material was concerned, there was a possibility of reasonable compromise. The Americans (and their European allies) were anxious above all to make sure that Soviet nuclear weapons did not fall into the wrong hands. They wanted examples of the latest Soviet technology, particularly the Typhoon and Delta submarines and their missiles, but for the most part they were indifferent to the acquisition by China of such conventional weapons as could be salvaged from the Soviet forces, though it must be said that some of the Asian states had distinct misgivings.

  There could also be ready agreement between China and the West that no attempt would be permitted to restore or create a central authority over the whole of Soviet Asia. There was little risk of this occurring in the circumstances at the end of the 1985 war but a mutual guarantee that any future attempt to restore a central authority would be resisted by both sides helped considerably to smooth the negotiations.

  The future of the ethnic minorities in Central Asia had many complications. The most important in the context of the American-Chinese negotiation was that there were people of the same ethnic origin and culture living on both sides of the Soviet-Chinese frontier and the establishment of independent states out of the remains of Soviet Central Asia might seem to the Chinese an undesirable magnet for some of the Moslem peoples of Sinkiang. The Chinese might have been prepared to make use of this circumstance to subvert the Soviet Central Asians before and during the period of the war, but it was a different matter if there were to be independent states of thirty to forty million Turkic-speaking Moslems on the former Soviet side of the border who would obviously be in some sort of relations with their co-religionists on the Chinese side. An attempt to ensure that such states should be under ultimate Chinese suzerainty of the kind once enjoyed by Tibet was rejected by the Americans in the name of self-determination and in the interests of Western relations with the rest of the Moslem world. Equally, it had to be conceded on the Western side that it would be wrong to attempt to create or to permit the creation of a single state embracing all the non-Soviet peoples of Central Asia. Since this was not in any case the wish of the Soviet Central Asians themselves, it was easy to make the concession. Their national identity, in so far as they had been able to maintain under Soviet domination their separate languages and cultures, was as Uzbeks, Kirghiz, Turkomans, Tajiks and so on, not as a conglomerate of Central Asian Moslems.

  The most suitable structure seemed likely to be a federation of these various nationalities with a fairly weak central government and a high degree of local autonomy, which was also sensible in view of the long distances between the centres of population and the disastrous state in which communications had been left by the war and subsequent tumults. It was possible, therefore, to reach agreement with the Chinese that both they and the Western allies would favour, or at least do nothing to oppose, the creation of a loose federation of this kind and that neither would seek to establish a dominant position with regard to it.

  These Central Asian republics were inhabited by the remains of the Turkic and Iranian peoples after the great westward migrations from this area which had overrun first Iran and then Asia Minor. They had themselves had a glorious past but had more recently sunk from sight after conquest by Tsarist Russia and incorporation after 1919 in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Only recently, in the 1970s, had their historical cities and monuments become the target of Western tourists, dazzled by the romantic names of Bokhara, Tashkent and Samarkand, and by the still brilliant remains of tombs and mosques and palaces.

  Their populations now amounted to some forty to fifty million people, the vast majority still speaking Turkic or Iranian languages as their mother tongues, in spite of strenuous efforts by Moscow to promote Russianization, and still maintaining allegiance to the Moslem religion, in spite of the closure of mosques and much hostile propaganda by the Soviet bureaucracy.

  There had not for many years been any evidence of nationalist agitation in this area. Material living standards had greatly improved since the period of native rule and there was just enough latitude in the use of the native languages and the promotion of native culture to satisfy the rather mild aspirations of the ethnic leaders. It was the events of 1979-80 in neighbouring Moslem territories which began to draw the attention of the inhabitants to the outside world, and made them more aware of the existence of fellow Moslems. They could not fail to note the contrast between the comparatively tolerant behaviour of the Soviet masters whom they saw in their midst and the behaviour of the same Soviets in Afghanistan, where a people of similar stock to themselves were visibly oppressed by the imposition of a communist regime and then violently attacked when they tried to express their opposition to it.

  The first Soviet occupation troops in Afghanistan had been largely drawn from the nearby Central Asian territories but the strain upon them had been too great when they were ordered to shoot at fellow Central Asians and fellow Moslems. These units were accordingly quite soon withdrawn, to be replaced by others with a higher proportion of non-Central Asian and non-Moslem conscripts. But the continuing lack of success of the Soviets in their attempts to 'pacify' Afghanistan and the continuing casualties which were reported as occurring in their forces (exaggerated no doubt as a result of the suppression of genuine news) led to a significant build-up of nationalist feeling in the Central Asian republics. People were already beginning to remind themselves that the constitution of the Soviet Union provided for the voluntary secession of any of the constituent republics, even though in practice the discussion of this possibility had led to a sticky end for those who had been rash enough to try it on. It should therefore have been no surprise to the Soviet authorities that the check to their advance in Europe, the defection of units fighting there whose men came largely from the Central Asian area, and the marked unwillingness of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan to carry out their warlike operations once the news from Europe turned sour, should precipitate an outbreak of nationalism. This happened first in Uzbekistan, where the populace took to the streets and proclaimed independence, and soon after that in other Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union as well.

  Looking now further south it is clear that India will be in no better state after 1985 than before to enter into any far-reaching economic or defensive international system. With population increase still out of control and with sprawling bureaucratic confusion as the nearest approach to government, the struggle to maintain a place in the modern world is going to seem increasingly forlorn. The loss of the Soviet counterpoise to China will upset the Indian external balancing act, and the break-up of a neighbouring empire may stimulate fissiparous tendencies in the Indian federation. If China, or a Sino-Japanese co-prosperity system succeeds, there will be many Indian politicians pressing to follow this example. But the more likely chance must be that India will long remain an inward-looking depressed area, whose future, like that of much of Africa, will depend on the successful restoration of the north-south dialogue, never yet very fruitful and now grievously interrupted by the 1985 war, and the even more pressing agenda of post-war settlement in northern Asia.

  All this has left the vast
expanse of Siberia to an unplanned future, which is hardly surprising, since the interests of the rest of the world in it were never more than marginal. Its water resources might have to be exploited sooner or later to improve food production in Central Asia, though not on the grandiose lines of the Soviet plans to reverse the flow of great rivers. Siberia's mineral resources and the oil offer a powerful attraction to Japanese economic exploitation, but this might well take place without the necessity of political control.

  The Trans-Siberian railway and the string of railway towns along it are a monument to Russia's historical conviction of a manifest destiny to march ever eastwards, as well as southwards, until it reached the sea. When the USSR turned its eyes towards the West, however, the settlements along this fragile line of communication were obliged to seek local solutions for their political future. The Soviets had from time to time tried to bring Siberia within the sphere of their own political and economic system. Khrushchev had proclaimed the importance of the new lands in Kazakhstan for revolutionizing the agriculture of the Soviet Union as a whole and had managed to persuade some millions of ethnic Russians to settle in this inhospitable desert, but the plan had never worked. There had also been a deliberate attempt to offset the growing demographic preponderance of the Central Asians by moving Russian settlers into the towns of Central Asia but this had not succeeded in making much change in the proportions between native Russians in the area and its Moslem inhabitants.

  Apart from these spasmodic and unsuccessful efforts to Russianize Asia, there could be no doubt that the general impression uppermost in the minds of most of the inhabitants of European Russia about their dominions in Asia was of their being used both in Tsarist times and again under communism as a penal settlement. After the war geography took its revenge and the traces of Soviet occupation began to disappear, except in the few centres in which former Soviet troops established settlements rather like the earlier Macedonian and Roman settler colonies of retired soldiers.

  In the longer term the fate of Asia, and not only of the former Soviet territories, is going to be shaped largely by the answers to questions about China. Can any system, can any set of men, successfully govern a country of a billion people? Assuming that, for a time, they can, will such a country be land-hungry, or power-hungry, or will it seek to control a vast defensive glacis like its predecessor as a world power in the Eurasian landmass? It is still too early to attempt an assessment. In the short period since the war, China's external effort has been fully devoted to absorbing Mongolia and managing Vietnam. After the liquidation of the Soviet maritime command at Vladivostok it was inevitable that the United States with the connivance of its allies (including Japan and South Korea) should set up and maintain, however reluctantly, a Russian-manned centre of government and command until more permanent arrangements could be arrived at.

  Japan was for the time being busy settling into the Northern Islands it had now repossessed. It betrayed no overt interest in Sakhalin, but was no doubt concerned about possible Chinese ambitions in an area so recently a part of the Soviet empire. There will be hope that this, if it is made, will be China's 'last territorial demand' and that a period of stability will be seen to be required if China is to have any hope of remaining among the leaders of the twenty-first century.

  The answers to the questions about China will turn also on relationships with Japan and India. Japan will seek to give economic leadership but to avoid the political entanglement of its previous intervention in the mainland. Even so, the melding together of two such disparate economic systems will demand a fuller measure of tact and subtlety than has in the past always characterized Japanese policy. On the Chinese side much will depend upon whether the present pervasive state control of every facet of life can co-exist with the freedom of enterprise which all experience - including the recent negative experience of the Soviet Union - has shown to be necessary for economic development, even for economic survival. The United States will not be able to stay out of this vastly complicated process, as it might have hoped. If China is to remain a nuclear power, Japan is likely to feel the need for a continuing US guarantee of ultimate nuclear support against any nuclear threat from China. The non-proliferation argument seems likely to win the day, with the consequence of a US-Japan security arrangement continuing for an indefinite future. If such a guarantee were not maintained Japan would have to give thought to its own protection.

  But this is only one element in another long story of which we can now scarcely glimpse even the chapter headings.

  Postscript I

  It was not long after midnight in the Lefortovo prison in Moscow, in late August 1985. Two prisoners, tried, convicted and condemned to death, facing execution at dawn, had been brought together for their last night on earth in a cell which had, of course, for occasions such as this, been fitted with appropriate equipment for the recording of their conversation. One was Constantin Andrievich Malinsky, upon whom the mantle of Supreme Party Ideologist had fallen, as a successor to Suslov.

  The other one was Alexei Alexandrovich Nastin, lately Marshal of the Soviet Union and Defence Minister of the USSR.

  The record of their conversation proved to be of no great value to those who listened to it later. They had never been friends (who, at a high level in the CPSU, ever had any friends?) and had little to say to each other. Their differences in the past had been quite well known and each regarded it as something of an affront when, after perfunctory visits from their families (and offers, accepted by Nastin and refused with contempt by Malinsky, of last rites from the Church), they had been put into this cell to spend their last few hours together.

  “I recall,” said the ex-Minister of Defence, after a long silence, “that in that meeting where we discussed the use of nuclear weapons, near the end of last year, you were very much against it. Your argument was, I seem to recall, that there was no point in extending socialist rule over a world half destroyed, and that it was better to keep the world going more or less as it was, and move in by degrees. So when war came we did not use our nuclear armoury either from the start, as I advised, or even with its full weight when we were checked in central Europe. And this is where that has got us!”

  “I also recall,” said Malinsky, the some-time Supreme Ideologist, “I also recall, Comrade . . .”

  “Do we use that form of address any longer?” said the other.

  “It's a habit,” was the reply, with a shrug. “It does not matter a great deal how we address each other now, anyway. What I recall is that our difference of view was on a question of all or nothing. I thought we should use none. You thought we should use the lot. I do not think either of us was in favour of anything in between. We both recognized, I imagine, that once nuclear weapons were introduced there would be no possibility - as some misguided folk in the West seemed to suppose - of controlling their use at some arbitrary level.”

  “Using all we had was in the Russian traditional mode of making war. Using none was not. Never mind that now. What happened in the event was that the really incredible decision was in fact taken to do neither one thing nor the other. We would not use the lot nor would we refrain from using any. We would instead attack an important city (though not the capital: we should want that) of a major satellite in one high-yield strike and then ask for negotiations with the United States. It was almost unbelievable. I always thought the old man had gone over the top . . .”

  “Did you ever say so?” asked the former Supreme Ideologist.

  “No, of course not. Neither did you, and for the same reasons. Even in his dotage he held all the strings.”

  “Never embark on a journey, they used to say where I grew up, unless you mean to arrive. To go half way, or even less, and allow yourself to stop there, is asking for trouble.”

  “That is precisely what got us here,” said Marshal Nastin, the former Minister of Defence.

  Through the little window high up in the wall, behind its heavy iron grille, a paler shade of night heral
ded the approach of dawn.

  “Can't be long now,” said Malinsky.

  Even as he spoke boots sounded in the corridor outside and a key rattled in the lock.

  There had been good times, in the past, difficult times, but good times. That was all over now.

  The cell door opened.

  “Come,” said a voice. “It is time.”*

  * The taped record of this conversation found its way into the hands of an enterprising Italian journalist. The version given above was published in La Stampa on 25 June 1986.

  Postscript II

  Dimitri Vassilievitch Makarov had to find Nekrassov's father as soon as he could but he had first to make some enquiries. Soviet prisoners of war, after their surrender, were only lightly guarded, the policy of the Western allies being early controlled dispersal. For many of their guests in the concentration areas there was no great incentive to leave. Food was freely available here but very scarce outside. Considerable freedom of movement was allowed during the inevitably long delays before the very large numbers of ex-members of Warsaw Pact forces involved could be got to wherever in this huge area they wished to go, making the utmost use of what had lately been their own military transport.

  Officers and men had been collected and concentrated at the places where they laid down their arms, so that the personnel of divisions remained more or less together, at least for the time being. Nevertheless, it was more by luck than good management that Makarov found the man he was after. This was Boris Ivanienko, the driver of Andrei Nekrassov's BMP who, Makarov had learned, was still alive. Dimitri Vassilievitch heard from him of many others in the battalion who were not. Andrei's old Sergeant Major from No. 3 Company, for example, Astap Beda, with whom Andrei had maintained touch till near the end, was dead. Little Yuri had disappeared. Boris Ivanienko, however, before he found transport back to his Ukrainian home in Poltava, had much to tell Makarov in his own quiet way. He had got very close to his officer. Little could be said on either side but this was a relationship in which, on his side at any rate, there had been understanding and sympathy. He felt that there had been the same on the other, too. He spoke of how a compassionate and sensitive young man, good professional though he was, seemed increasingly to suffer under the strain of the madness that had engulfed them all, so that the bmp driver sometimes feared for his reason. What Makarov heard moved him greatly.