The Third World War: The Untold Story

Chapter 20: The Destruction of Minsk

As it became more and more evident that the Warsaw Pact programme of operations on the Central Front had fallen critically short of achieving its main objective in time and more and more cracks were opening up in the Eastern bloc, it was abundantly clear that a completely new situation was developing.

Debate at the highest level raged in both East and West as to what to do next. There was pressure in the US, with some German support, to allow the momentum of warlike preparation in the West, and above all in the US, to follow its logical path, to mobilize the national aspiration long dormant in the Soviet Union's subject peoples and move Allied forces in to push the Soviets back where they came from and restore freedom in Eastern Europe. Agreement among the Allies on a matter so complex and of such far-reaching importance was unlikely to be reached easily. In the first place it would be a mistake to suppose, as was very quickly pointed out, that the forces of the Warsaw Pact had been defeated. In spite of the desertion, almost en masse, of General Ryzanov's 3 Shock Army in the Netherlands, Warsaw Pact forces continued to be far more powerful than those facing them on the battlefields in Europe. Moreover, the Soviet Union's nuclear capability was still intact. But time was running out. There was something approaching open revolt in Poland and in the forward area a Polish regiment, following the example set in 3 Shock Army, had surrendered en bloc to the Americans. Defections from Warsaw Pact armies were increasing daily, in spite of the KGB. The total now ran into many thousands. It was not only in countries of the Warsaw Pact that there were signs of growing discontent. In the Baltic states of the Soviet Union itself, as well as in Belorussia and the Ukraine, there was mounting disaffection.

None the less it was certainly not a foregone conclusion that subject nations would everywhere be easily aroused to revolt. The habits of servitude and resignation were deeply ingrained. The Communist Party had been actively engaged for so long and with such assiduity in the detection and ruthless liquidation of any source of opposition that leadership would be difficult to establish and response to it might be sluggish — unless truly dramatic events provided a powerful stimulus. Just such a stimulus, as events proved, was not far off.

In the Soviet Union the Defence Council had been since early July in complete control, though the full Politburo was summoned from time to time to broaden the scope of discussion, to allocate responsibilities and review the performance of individuals. The Politburo was now summoned for 8 am on 19 August to meet in the VKP, the Volga Command Post built into the granite near Kuybyshev, 600 kilometres south-east of Moscow, in Stalin's time and greatly enlarged and improved since then. The most urgent requirement was to discuss the possibility of nuclear action.

The five members of the Defence Council had met the previous night but had been quite unable to agree. The pattern of disagreement formulated in a meeting of the Politburo on 6 December 1984, when the Operational Plan for 1985 had been discussed, had persisted essentially unchanged ever since. Aristanov, Chairman of the KGB, and Marshal Nastin, Minister of Defence, both members of the Defence Council, had always supported the view that operations against the West should be nuclear from the start. The Supreme Party Ideologist Malinsky, who was also a member of the Defence Council, had strongly opposed this, ably supported by two members of the Politburo, who were not, as it happened, also members of the Defence Council. These were Berzinsh, Leader of the Organization of the Party and State Control, and the Ukrainian Nalivaiko, responsible for relations with socialist countries. The milder view had prevailed in December and was later accepted as official policy. There would be no nuclear opening to an offensive against the West and nuclear weapons would not be used as long as victory could be seen to be certain without them. It was agreed, however, that if there were a setback in the operation, and the plan did not look like being completely successful in a non-nuclear mode, the matter would be urgently re-opened. The moment to re-open it had now come.

At the Defence Council meeting, which went on to 3 am without agreement, Malinsky, who still opposed the use of nuclear weapons on the grounds that at this stage it would be premature and on balance do far more harm than good, had been in a minority, with two members strongly against him, Aristanov and Nastin both arguing for a full-scale nuclear offensive at once, using all weapons, while the other two members remained undecided. It was Malinsky who succeeded in causing the full Politburo to be called. This was duly summoned for 8 am. In between meetings the General Secretary, advanced in years, clearly unwell and seen by some to be visibly failing (though they could hardly say so) summoned both sides separately. One was for using all, the other for using none. He himself, it appears, was in favour of one powerful strike on a prominent Western satellite nation, a European member of the Alliance with influence in Europe. The target would not be the capital: that would be needed in the future and its destruction might in any case be counter-productive for the purpose in mind. This was to issue a dramatic warning to the world, while at the same time inviting the US to immediate discussion of a ceasefire.

Neither Aristanov nor Malinsky, though they could hardly discuss it, thought much of this. They were both, in the last resort, men who would back all or nothing and reject half measures.

At the meeting of the Politburo the General Secretary steered discussion towards the conclusion he had chosen. The Chief of the General Staff was invited to advise on a country and a target. After a short adjournment to consult advisers he came back to propose attack on Birmingham in England. On the strong representations of Aristanov and Malinsky, for once in agreement, the matter, before the issue of any executive order, was taken back by the General Secretary for further consideration by the Defence Council, which was ordered to meet in an hour's time. When the Supreme Party Ideologist and Chairman of the KGB turned up for the meeting they found the door closed and two of the General Secretary's personal security guard, automatic pistols in hand, barring the way. It was apparent that they were not wanted. Inside, the General Secretary had no difficulty in arriving at a joint decision to carry out a single warning strike and the President of the Soviet Union was then informed of what was expected of him.

A very precisely detailed plan was made to allow him to warn the President of the United States over the hot line immediately the strike had been launched that one, and only one, missile was on its way and to indicate its target. He was to emphasize that this was in the nature of a warning to the Alliance, a warning which, it would be noted, though severe, was being given without doing any harm to the United States. It was not the initiation of an inter-continental exchange, in which, he was to remind the other President, the Soviet Union disposed of a very powerful second-strike capability. President Vorotnikov would hope and most earnestly urged that the US would now agree to very early discussions. Otherwise there could be further selective strikes.

The hot line conversation, amid frantic speculation on the Allied side, was arranged for 1020 hours Greenwich Mean Time (1320 local time) the next day, 20 August. President Vorotnikov duly delivered his message.

At 1030 hours GMT exactly, the one megaton warhead launched by the USSR detonated at 3,500 metres above Winson Green, in Birmingham, with results which we have recorded elsewhere.[27]

At 1035 hours GMT the British Prime Minister and the President of the United States agreed on instant reprisal. The French President gave his concurrence and the Allies were all informed, even as instructions were on their way to two nuclear submarines, one each of the United States and Royal Navies. As a result of these the ancient and beautiful city of Minsk was totally destroyed, in a devastating attack even more dreadful in its power and its appalling results than that on Birmingham, and the events were set in train which were to tear the imperial structure of the Soviet Union apart and leave the world in general bewilderment, with parts of it in total chaos.

The hideous and gigantic doom which descended upon the unsuspecting city of Minsk in the early afternoon of 20 August stunned the world. Following hard upon the disaster which had overtaken the city of Birmingham in England less than an hour before, it did much to alter the outlook of people in our time with, beyond any doubt at all, a powerful impact on history in time to come. Is it possible, people ask, and will go on asking, that human beings can allow themselves to be driven into situations in which they find no alternative to this?

The four missiles, each of between 200 and 300 kilotons, which detonated over the centre of the city of Minsk at 1350 local time (1050 GMT) on 20 August at 3,000 metres, set up a towering fiery beacon which would be seen nearly as far off as Moscow, 600 kilometres away. The missiles did not, as distant observers noted, all. detonate at once. One exploded, then almost immediately two more, and after a second or two the fourth. Ground zeros were all within a circle, as subsequent investigation has established, of a radius of roughly 1,000 metres.

The fireball of the first soared up in dreadful majesty alone from its point of detonation at 3 kilometres to a height of nearly 12, a beacon of light more searing than the sun. The next two, very near to each other in time and space, closely pursued the first, the fireballs of all three merging into one gigantic, blinding pillar. The fourth and last followed a few moments later and did not rise so high, reaching up some 10 kilometres into the base of an immense and growing mass of cloud. What seemed about to form huge mushrooms was now writhing in promethean patterns, turning, twisting and whirling, beginning within one minute of the first explosion to form a single colossal cloud rising to a height of some 25 kilometres across a span of 30 or 40 and now spreading in one single blanket across the sky. The blinding light from the central pillar lasted a full twenty seconds even in the clarity of an August afternoon sky.

The unbelievably fierce effect of the downward heatwave was felt first. At a range of over 15 kilometres from the epicentre people clad in ordinary summer clothing in the open received burns which demanded immediate medical attention if they were not to prove fatal. Such attention was almost never forthcoming. The epicentre of the attack, above which the missiles had been set to detonate, was the grandiose building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia, built in the late 1930s in the style then current to emphasize the power, extent and modernity of socialism. In front of it stood a full-size statue of Lenin. Within a few seconds of the first detonation this immense structure was no more than a great pile of rubble. Somewhere in there the statue of Lenin, the principal architect of all this huge disorder, lay pounded into dust. Up to some 5 kilometres from the former Communist Party headquarters, everything combustible was immediately set on fire. Fires were also springing up further out from the centre but the heat pulse was followed in a few seconds by blast waves of terrific power which extinguished many of the fires raging in the centre itself. The huge pressures developed by blast crushed everything immediately below, so that within 5 kilometres of the centre everything above ground level, of whatever construction, was brought crashing to the earth. The effect of the blast wave declined as it travelled outwards and some buildings of stouter construction still remained standing, if badly damaged, further out, though structures more lightly built, if not immediately destroyed by blast, were often torn apart by the hurricane winds that followed it. As far out as 12 kilometres from the city centre railway trucks were hurled from the permanent way, oil tanks were split asunder and their contents spread, while overhead wiring everywhere came down.

The noise of these explosions, in a continuous roar, lasted for more than thirty seconds at Dzerzhinsk, for example, some 30 kilometres away to the south-west and an important centre of local administration with a key railway station, as it also did at Borisov, about the same distance away from Minsk on the direct railway line to Moscow in the north-east. Damage at this range was relatively slight, though very many windows were broken, but the terrifying burning fiery furnace, with its stupefying noise, stunned all who saw it, even those who saved their sight by turning away.

The attack came quite without warning and though there were shelters available for at least a part of the population, very few people were in them. Of the one and a quarter million inhabitants of the city of Minsk, some 50,000 were killed almost instantly. Some, so badly burnt in the first thermal pulse as to have no hope of survival, were mercifully killed in the blast wave which almost immediately followed, while many were buried alive in the piles of masonry from buildings thrown down by the shock.

Something that could be seen from near Moscow, some 600 kilometres' distant, was even more clearly manifest in important places nearer to Minsk itself. It was visible in Riga, capital of Latvia to the north-west, in Kiev in the south-east and in Warsaw some 450 kilometres to the south-west. The pillar of fire was seen and the rumble of the detonations clearly heard at Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, only 170 kilometres away, while in the important Lithuanian city of Kaunas, 100 kilometres further off, the disturbance in the sky was also clearly visible and the rumble of the bursts was plainly heard. The inhabitants of Bobruisk, also in Belorussia and only 150 kilometres away from Minsk, were shocked and terrified. Much was seen and heard in Smolensk, Vitebsk, Gomel and Brest, on the Belorussian/Polish border. In all these important places, each with its own political interests, there was confusion and uncertainty and everyone was gripped by a fear approaching panic as to what might happen next.

In the suburbs of Minsk, where there were still wooden buildings, something approaching a firestorm was developing, generated in the tremendous currents of air caused by the impact of the blast wave. It was scarcely possible that any living thing could survive in the inner part of the city and if any did it could not be for long. On the outskirts burnt and blinded people, many bleeding badly from the effects of flying glass and other debris carried through the air by winds approaching hurricane force, all in a severe state of shock, were stumbling about in a forlorn search for parents or children and for medical assistance of which there was no hope at all. Others whose injuries prevented movement or who were pinned in wreckage from which there was no possibility of their rescue lay where they were in a state of stunned despair.

Soviet provision for civil defence had been held up in the early 1980s as something to admire and imitate. It is true that there were in the neighbourhood of Minsk concentrations of civil defence expertise and equipment at places like Borisov, Bobruisk and Baranovichi. All available resources were mobilized and moved in towards the disaster area. The authorities, however, were less concerned with the alleviation of personal distress than with the control of the movement of refugees, pathetic crowds of people who came pouring out from the outskirts of Minsk and its neighbouring regions along the roads towards Orsha and Bobruisk, people still alive, unlike those in the city, but suffering greatly from burns, injuries from falling masonry and a thousand other sources of distress. Almost all came on foot. By the outbreak of war the private ownership of motor vehicles in Minsk was at the level normal in Soviet cities, that is, at about that found among black South Africans. The few that there were had, of course, at once been requisitioned. Here and there in this heart-rending horde there would be a military or official motor vehicle, or one seized by force. For the most part the crowd just stumbled hurriedly on, carrying bits of household gear or food or bedding, wheeling perambulators, or handcarts upon which old or injured people sometimes lay. They only wanted, for the most part, in their state of stunned stupor, to get away.

The problem of controlling their movement, daunting though it might be, was in the Soviet fashion fairly easily solved, at least in the first instance. The USSR had raised more than 1,000 KGB battalions in the process of mobilization. It was not difficult to put a barrage round Minsk at a distance of some 12 kilometres from the centre and shoot anyone not belonging to the Party structure or the military who wished to come further.

At a distance of some 30 kilometres (in front of Borisov for example) a further ring of KGB troops was established. It was their business not to shoot down anyone attempting to get through but simply to send them back, with the exception of any individuals who could prove an official connection.

The headquarters of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia had moved out from Minsk on the outbreak of war and was established, together with the headquarters of the Belorussian Military District, in Orsha. These two centres of power, the military and the civil acting jointly, with the military commander technically in charge but the Party First Secretary as his deputy the real source of authority, now faced a truly frightening task of relief and reorganization. It was quite beyond the resources of the republic of Belorussia. It was formidable even for the USSR and could hardly be contemplated without despair.

Only much later would the question arise why such an appalling disaster should ever have been invited and who was to blame. There will probably never be an answer. What is sure is that it should never have happened and must never be allowed to happen again.

Chapter 21: Soviet Disintegration

Minsk was chosen as the target for the Western nuclear attack because of its general comparability with Birmingham as the Soviet target. To destroy Moscow or Leningrad would have been a fast jump up the ladder of escalation. An important provincial city was required, far enough from the capital so that no direct physical effects would be felt there, but near enough for immediate political repercussions on the seat of government. Minsk answered this bill. It was not just a specimen city of the Soviet Union, but the capital of the Belorussian Republic, one of the principal constituent units of the USSR, and singled out for special prominence by being allotted a fictionally independent seat at the United Nations. The stability and coherence of the area was weakened by the frontier changes after the Second World War, when Poland was pushed bodily westwards, absorbing parts of Germany, but losing territory, and population, to Belorussia and the Ukraine. As a result there were important Catholic minorities in both these republics. The destruction of Minsk would clearly add to the internal strains in the whole area.

The Ukraine, lying immediately to the south of Belorussia, is far larger and more important. It occupies an area greater than that of France and has a population of about the same size. Before the war it produced more steel than the Federal Republic of Germany, with major armament works at Kharkov and Kiev. Kiev was the capital of the First Russia, before the Tartar invasion and before the emergence of Moscow. But the Ukraine had never been an independent state. It was a battlefield between Poles and Russians, Turks and even Swedes, before it was finally absorbed by Russia in 1654. However, the memories of former greatness and the idea of Ukrainian independence had never wholly died. They had, indeed, been revived by Stalinist persecution and by the repression of a fragmentary independence movement in 1966.

After Minsk the Ukrainians could well fear that Kiev or Kharkov would be next on the Allied targeting list. There was another more long-standing anxiety: insurrection was now widespread in Poland and receiving active and increasing support from the Western allies. As we have seen, this was already weakening the Soviet military effort in Germany. The destruction of Minsk would make it even more difficult for the Soviet Union to control the situation in Poland. If Poland were to escape from Soviet hegemony, one of its first ambitions would probably be to recover the Polish territory lost to Belorussia and the Ukraine. The Ukraine would be wise not to lose much time in claiming its own independence and looking after its own interests rather than those of its Soviet overlords.

To the north of Belorussia, the brief independence of the three Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, had also been extinguished by the USSR in the Second World War, but they had never been wholly assimilated and were now likely to be early candidates for freedom. Minsk therefore proved politically more significant in death than it had ever been in life. Its destruction triggered the dissolution of the whole western border area of the Soviet Union, not only by showing the vulnerability of Soviet power but by releasing, through the psychological Shockwaves of four nuclear missiles, the nationalistic passions which had lain dormant for so long.

This particular denouement had not been in mind when the young Vasyl Duglenko, a promising graduate from the Kiev police academy, was infiltrated by Ukrainian nationalists into the KGB, thanks to a favourable recommendation from no less than Khrushchev himself. It was this action, nevertheless, and Duglenko's subsequent appointment to the security section in the Kremlin, which made sure that the Soviet system could be overthrown from within, and that it would be followed by the establishment of separate nations on the ruins of the Soviet empire.

The mechanics of conspiracy are hard to unravel. To misquote the old epigram, if treason prospers it is not treason but a constitutional change of regime: and the secret plotting is swept under the carpet in the hope that it may not serve as a model for the next attempt at change. But three main elements were required for the success of the momentous coup which toppled the CPSU: the Ukrainian network in the KGB which had access to the inner sanctum of the Command Post being used at the time, to which Politburo and Defence Council had transferred their functions from the Kremlin; the disaffection of some of the Politburo members who had struggled under the leadership of Chief Party Ideologist Malinsky against the nuclear decision and now saw their attitude vindicated in the appalling devastation of the capital of Belorussia, with stupendous human suffering, and the gigantic surge of feeling which could lead to disintegration in the western regions; and influential officers of the Soviet High Command anxious to preserve a core of military strength as the foundation and guarantee of a successor Soviet state. For these were conscious that any further nuclear attack on the Soviet Union would destroy the chances of survival of organized authority and they knew that this could now only be provided by the armed forces.

All these groups had watched with growing apprehension the checks to Soviet forces on western fronts, the reverses of Soviet policy in the peripheral adventures, the signs of approaching break-up in Central Asia, and above all the incapacity of the leadership to understand and to adjust to what was happening. This was particularly noticeable in the formerly all-powerful General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, whose physical and mental deterioration was so marked that total breakdown could not be far off. The need of each group for allies in the right places overcame their seasoned caution, and contacts had begun to be made. Duglenko found a fellow Ukrainian in the highest ranks of the General Staff in Colonel General Vladimir Borisovich Ivanitskiy, Chief of the First Main (Strategic) Directorate. The latter knew the divisions in the Politburo intimately and had no difficulty in identifying the right members to approach at the crucial moment. The decision to bomb Birmingham gave them all the evidence they needed that the Party Secretary had lost his head (and some would even go so far as to say his reason) and should be removed at a very early opportunity. From the effect of the nuclear attack on Minsk they drew the assurance that Soviet forces west of the capital would be in no position to support or to restore the existing regime once it was overthrown. The example set by the defection of a great part of 3 Shock Army, under General Ryzanov, now freely co-operating with the British, German and Dutch in the Northern Army Group, supported and maintained by them in armed hostility to forces loyal to the regime, was being already followed in other parts of the Soviet forces as well. For the overthrow of the regime it now only remained for the method to emerge and the moment to be chosen. The Minsk disaster had become the fulcrum upon which the lever of popular disaffection already labouring to displace the Soviet regime could now operate. The method was there, the moment was there, but time was short. A meeting of the Politburo had been summoned to meet early on the following morning, 22 August.

The start of the October revolution of 1917 had been signalled by a cannon shot from the Aurora. On this occasion, in 1985, it was evident that a more prosaic pistol shot would have to suffice, but if it could be aimed precisely at the General Secretary himself it would do all that was required. Duglenko assumed responsibility for this part of the operation, counting on his access, for security purposes, to the most closely guarded parts of the Command Post currently in use.

Some vital problems still remained. Who was going to take power in succession to the Secretary, and how were the conspirators to make sure that they, and no one else in the hierarchic succession, secured the physical levers of supreme power, that is to say, control over the nuclear command system? Unless they had this control there would be a serious danger that some frustrated hard-line party or military group that had managed to secure it could decide that holocaust was preferable to surrender and start the ICBM attack on the West which would bring about the near-annihilation of the world. The conspirators had viewed with irony but also with apprehension the conflict of claims to authority by the top members of the US Government when the President of the United States was shot and nearly killed in 1981. The American version of 'hunt the black box', the search for the package containing the relatively simple apparatus without which, whatever other authority he possessed, even the President could not authorize nuclear release, had been farcical. A Soviet version in present circumstances could end in universal tragedy. The actual guardian of the box itself at the time, an army signals officer, would therefore have to be made to transfer his allegiance rapidly from the General Secretary to the conspirators' choice of successor, and not merely rely on the devolution of authority down the normal line of orthodox command. This was a practical detail to which Duglenko gave very close attention.

Just before the meeting, ordered for 5 am on that fateful morning of 22 August, it was learnt that the General Secretary had been taken seriously ill and would not be able to attend. In this crisis, both of the country and the Communist Party, with the leadership faltering, it was imperative to defer what looked like developing into a personal power struggle over the succession in the Politburo — or more probably, between the five members of the Defence Council — until decisions of the most pressing urgency had been taken, first of all on what was arising out of the nuclear attack on Minsk. In the absence of the General Secretary the chairmanship of the meeting had to be in the hands of someone of the highest prestige who, at the same time, would not be taken too seriously as a contender for personal power. The not unprecedented, though unusual, step was taken by common consent of bringing in the titular head of state President Vorotnikov to take the chair.

All ten members of the Politburo (excluding, of course, the General Secretary) were expected to attend the meeting. Duglenko's first task was to see that his own chief, Aristanov, Chairman of the KGB, did not. He had moreover not only to be prevented from attending this meeting but any other that might be held subsequently. With the help of his Ukrainian driver, Duglenko did not find the fatal accident which was required for the purpose impossibly difficult to arrange and, of course, it was Duglenko himself who could expect to be called in to explain the absence of the chief he should have accompanied to the meeting.

As soon as the Politburo assembled, under the chairmanship of President Vorotnikov, KGB Chairman Aristanov's empty chair was at first assumed to be the result of pressing state security business in Belorussia, but also raised fears that the KGB were plotting independent action. Only one of the members knew that the actual plotters were already within the gates. This, of course, was Taras Kyrillovich Nalivaiko, the member of the Politburo responsible for relations with socialist countries and a fellow Ukrainian. Some others were to have ample leisure in future to reflect on the poignancy of the always unanswered question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, or in Soviet terms, if you give too much power to the state security force, what is to prevent it from taking the rest?

Power was soon to come flaming from the barrel of a gun, when Duglenko was invited to represent the KGB Chairman and present his report and, instead, drew a revolver and shot the unfortunate Vorotnikov, President of the Soviet Union, through the heart. As Duglenko saw it, whoever was in the chair which would otherwise have been occupied by the General Secretary was the only proper target, if he were to achieve his aim of establishing control over the gathering. The room now quickly filled up with Ukrainian security personnel, and as Malinsky, Supreme Party Ideologist, began to speak asserting his own claim to the leadership, two of these removed Vorotnikov's body. Duglenko promptly occupied his chair. The man with the black box (who, as it had been contrived, was also a Ukrainian and a party to the conspiracy) ostentatiously moved in behind him, confirming the newly established leadership with this obvious demonstration that it was well on the road to nuclear command. Duglenko then announced his assumption of supreme authority. A few of the members of the Politburo who protested were quickly removed and the others, including Malinsky, forced smiles and came out with a round of ritual applause.

As for the General Secretary, it was known before the morning was out that he had been struck down by a heart attack and was dead. This caused no surprise and curiously little sadness. It also had almost no effect on the course of events, for the General Secretary had already for some time been seen by his colleagues as a burnt-out case and largely disregarded. The man who once bestrode the narrow world — or a great part of it anyway — like a Colossus as the successor in a line from Lenin, through Stalin and Khrushchev, in the exercise of absolute power over huge domains, had simply failed and faded out like a candle in the wind. He had done much to increase the worldwide power and influence of the Soviet Union, and the absolute dominion within it of the Communist Party. It was here, in the attempt to protect and perpetuate the position of the Party, that he had himself sharpened the contradictions which in the end would bring it down.

Duglenko was faced with an almost impossible task. It is to his credit that he put first things first and dealt with some of them, erecting at the same time a few breakwaters against the engulfing chaos. What were the priorities? First of all came the situation in Belorussia and all that arose from it. The relief of the appalling human suffering which resulted from the Western response to the nuclear destruction of Birmingham threw a huge and immediate burden on the Soviet Union. This and its associated security problems could certainly be carried, given a little time. There was, however, already widespread fear, almost amounting to panic in some western areas — in the Ukraine for example, and the Baltic republics, apart from Warsaw Pact states — about what would happen next. Supposing this disaster were not the last but only the first of many? What comfort would the citizens of Kharkov find in the confident assurance that if they and their own city were destroyed the incineration of Detroit would follow? Could any governmental structure, however absolute, however well provided with the apparatus of repression by brute force, contain the consequences if questions such as these were asked? If the structure were one forced upon unwilling men and women whose aspirations to national independence, though deeply hidden, were still strong, might not these now explode and so destroy the hard case in which they had been hitherto enclosed?

Relief of the position in Belorussia, the stilling of panic fears in central Europe and an end to the fighting were all aspects of one problem. There had to be a nuclear stand-down and a ceasefire ending the war in such a way as to avoid a general sauve-qui-peut of the Soviet armies. Then there was the nationality problem, that is, as Duglenko saw it, the independence of the Ukraine and its defence against Poland. And finally there was food. The food shortages, leading to riots (which we look at in the next chapter) were a phenomenon of the great cities but, since government also perforce resided in great cities, the food had to be brought in if government was to continue. Returning armies, too, needed food if they were not to turn into a rabble of looters.

Here were critical elements of a proposal for armistice which had rapidly to be put to the Americans. First of all Duglenko would propose a ceasefire worldwide with the stand-down of all nuclear forces at 0001 hours local time 23 August. This had to be followed by a massive relief operation in Belorussia, for which advanced planning parties were invited to arrive within thirty-six hours. Soviet ships were already being recalled to base and Soviet armed forces would leave occupied territory by stages to be agreed under arrangements made by Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. Grain would be shipped from the West and distributed under Red Cross auspices to relieve distress in Soviet cities outside the Minsk disaster area and provide minimum rations for Soviet forces provided they followed agreed withdrawal plans. The territory of all countries in Europe would be respected, pending a peace treaty, but the Ukraine and Belorussia, and such other of the Soviet republics as wished, would immediately assume responsibility for their own territories and would be free to decide whether they wished to join with others in any larger group, though the Warsaw Pact would be immediately abolished and could not be re-created.

Having established his authority at the head of the Soviet system, which he was about to liquidate, and having ordered an immediate standstill of Soviet forces, Duglenko was able to speak on the hot line to the US President less than thirty-six hours after the destruction of Minsk to report what had happened and to propose the terms of ceasefire and armistice. The West could perhaps be pardoned for a period of stupefaction and confusion at the extent of their success — or more correctly, perhaps, the failure of their opponent. In other circumstances they might have been able to appreciate rather more accurately the hollowness of the new Soviet regime. There were also hawkish Westerners who wanted to demand unconditional surrender and have it proclaimed before the world media in the Kremlin. They were outvoted in favour of terms based on those put forward by Duglenko, for two reasons.

The first area of an Allied advance would be the GDR. Western occupation of this territory would pose inescapably the question of German unity, which was still a bugbear to Western Europe, even to many Germans in the Federal Republic. The argument of disorder was also powerful. Had not the Bolshevik success in 1917 been made possible by the return to Russia of defeated and mutinous troops, who became the agents of revolution? Was it not also the Kerensky Government's brave decision to continue the war against Germany which contributed greatly to its downfall? Now, in 1985, there was a rare chance to reverse the previous disastrous course of history: to make peace with the provisional government and, instead of sending a communist revolutionary in a sealed train, as the Germans had done with Lenin in 1917, to send trucks of grain.

The massive relief operation in the Minsk area was put in hand by the United States at once, with immediate Allied help, and then handed over to the United Nations. The ceasefire was agreed within the proposed time limit. The armistice had to take a little longer, and delegates from both commands met at the NATO headquarters in Brussels. Western representation was fairly straightforward. On the Eastern side, however, there had not been time for all the communist regimes to be replaced by something else. Representation was therefore confined to the Soviet High Command, Poland (where the leaders of Solidarity had lost no time in emerging from prisons and internment camps and assuming the power which had so narrowly escaped them in 1981) and the newly established independent governments of the Ukraine, Belorussia and the three Baltic states. A Kazakh from Alma-Ata arrived halfway through the proceedings to announce the independence of the Central Asian republics.

The armistice was of course only the beginning of a very long process of reordering the political geography of large parts of Europe and Asia. It is still going on. A major threat to mankind's future had been eliminated, but this did not mean that mankind would at once become as angels. Indeed, the relaxation of fear and of dictatorship gave freedom not only to breathe again, but to resume many of the ancient and modern quarrels which had been temporarily suppressed by the greater danger. Their resumption took place, none the less, under the tragic but in its own way salutary recollection of the terrible events which took place in Birmingham and, far worse, in Minsk. Before looking at the re-ordering of the map, however, we might catch our own breath and very briefly examine some of the reasons which conditioned the resolution of the main drama and take a look, at close quarters, at its effect on ordinary Soviet citizens.

Chapter 22: The Experience of Defeat

“They'll be shooting us all soon,” sighed Nikolay Kryukov. Other prisoners turned to him, but he just went on musing aloud, talking to no one in particular. He was a huge rough man from Murom, an ancient city 200 kilometres east of Moscow.

“When things are so unstable it's dangerous for the Party to keep us alive, even in prison. Sasha here has tried to organize a free trade union. Peter has taken part in a strike. I am known to have read books on the banned list, Adam Goldman has joined in demonstrations, Jan Bruminsh raised the national flag in Riga, Dima Nalivaiko did the same in Kiev. They must see us as detonators in a powder store, so they've isolated us, surrounded us with guard towers and machine-guns, barbed wire and dogs.

“During the Second World War opponents of the regime held in Soviet camps were systematically shot. That's in the official histories.”

“Why should we wait until one by one they start shooting us? We must act now. Now. I haven't talked about this earlier because we've got provocateurs here. Our only chance lies in immediate action, all together, with little or no preparation. When this rest break ends, we'll all go back to work and then move instantly. What I'm going to say now is for the provocateurs. I don't know who you are, but you're here for sure. We've got seven minutes left until the end of the break. That's when we get under way. Anyone attempting to approach the guards before the break ends will be considered a provocateur, and I'll kill him with this shovel.” Kryukov raised a shovel, which was like a toy in his great paws.

“I now want all the tractor drivers over here. Not all at once: we don't want to attract any attention.”

Over by the central gate to the building site the supervisor banged on a piece of rail suspended from a post. The sound echoed across the site, signalling the end of the break. Slowly the prisoners got up and wandered off back to their work. A heavy tractor coughed into life, the circular saw started up, cement-mixers were turning. Everything seemed to be as usual. One of the tractors lumbered slowly off. Then, suddenly, it turned on the spot and the driver in a prison pea-jacket jumped down, while the tractor slowly crawled on towards one of the guard towers. A second and then a third tractor followed suit, each ploughing its stolid way towards a separate tower. The guards, taken by surprise, soon reacted and began to pour machine-gun bullets into the first tractor. It just carried on its way, until, meeting with the resistance of the guard tower, slowly and methodically pushed it aside. With a cry the man on guard came down, his machine-gun with him. The tractor carried on past the crumpled tower towards the rows of barbed wire. The second tractor was not so lucky. It missed the guard tower and, deflected by a rock at the first line of barbed wire, failed to break through. The third tractor brought down its guard tower and moved effortlessly through the barbed wire beyond. The way to freedom was open.

Hundreds of shouting prisoners tore through the breaks in the wire under a hail of wild machine-gun fire. Dogs tried to head them off but cascades of toxic foam from fire extinguishers, snatched up at the towers, held them back. A machine-gun from one of the towers was seized by the crowd. The scene was a terrifying one: 700 raging men armed with hammers and spades, with fire-extinguishers and, now, a machine-gun. And they still had one tractor in reserve. They turned it towards the guards' barracks. The guards ran shouting and screaming out of the doors or jumped out of the windows, straight into machine-gun fire. A second attack was under way. The grey-black crowd roared towards the central gates. One of them had picked up an automatic lying on the ground and still yet another machine-gun fell into the prisoners' hands. Fire broke out in the more distant guard towers. But the guards there had long since deserted their posts and fled into the forest.

The throng of prisoners pulled down the gates and were free.

“Wait!” shouted Nikolay Kryukov, a machine-gun in his hands. “Listen to me. In this situation prisoners usually go off into the forest in small groups, on the basis that you can't catch a lot of hares in one go. But we're no hares, and times have changed now anyway. The communists haven't the forces to hunt us through the forest. I'm forming a National Liberation Detachment. Anyone who wants to join — come with me. If not — then go off separately or in small groups.”

Kryukov got 193 men for his detachment.

Immediately after the uprising the Lithuanian prisoners formed their own group of twenty-seven. They thanked Kryukov, took their leave of the other political prisoners and set off back towards Lithuania. It was a long way off but what else could they do? A group of Armenians followed suit with even further to go, as well as a score or so of Baptists making for Kursk. There were a couple of hundred common criminals in with the political prisoners; some asked to join Kryukov, but he declined to take them. Some of the politicals had to be left behind too — if they were seriously wounded or suffering from leg injuries which made walking difficult. A small camp was organized for them on an island in the swamp, where they were left with an automatic rifle and sixty rounds of ammunition, together with such stores and medicaments as had been seized. Kryukov's detachment then set off into the forest.

Kryukov himself realized that they should not go far. He would be hunted in the woods and marshes, so it would be better to hang out near a camp, where no one would think of looking for him. The detachment made a great loop through the forest, coming back to where their tricky journey had started. The following night they attacked a neighbouring camp for political prisoners. The guards' attention was directed inside the camp, not towards the perimeter — an ancient and natural instinct of prison guards. Hence the attack could go in quickly and quietly, without much shooting and with few losses to the attackers. Six hundred political prisoners and 400 criminals were then set free from the camp. There were also rich pickings — 100 automatics, several cases of ammunition, many grenades. Kryukov now had 297 politicals in his detachment. The prisoners hanged the entire prison guard from the gateposts and guard towers and the detachment then took cover in the forest. This time Kryukov held a council of war and decided to head straight for the industrial area in the Urals — to Chelyabinsk and Magnitogorsk… “[28]

The question is still being asked, how was it possible for Duglenko's conspiracy to succeed; how could a system established for so long, buttressed by the largest security apparatus in the world and governed by an all-powerful Communist Party, be overthrown in a few minutes' gun battle in the inner sanctum of the Politburo in the Command Post?

The general answer is that the system, in spite of all appearances, was already permeated by decay, like a wooden structure devoured by termites, when only the outer shell remains and can be knocked over by a minor accident. Considered in outline, the situation brought into being by the war held powerful elements of change. The check to the Soviet advance in Europe, the defection of units of the armed forces to the enemy, the fear of total nuclear devastation following one horrifying disaster, and the initial signs of break-up in the east — all these might have been weathered if the system had been generally sound. As it was, they brought into the open the disillusion and hatred that so many in the USSR had long been harbouring in their hearts. Reactions to failure, to fear and to hunger were for the first time stronger than the customary caution of the citizen towards the secret policemen and the informer. The 'masses' on whom the regime was supposed to be based now at last realized the strength that numbers could give.

Three primary weaknesses were exposed. First of all, the system was grossly inefficient in producing material goods because of the distortions inherent in central planning in a state of the size of the Soviet Union, and because ideology still dominated economic theory. Secondly, agriculture was a disgrace and cause of shame. How could a vast area like the Soviet Union, with some of the most fertile soil in the world, not produce enough to feed its own people? Agricultural failures had been concealed because there was enough gold and gas produced in Siberia to find hard currency for American wheat and maize, but now, with the always inefficient distribution system upset by the demands of war, the lack of food in urban centres became a pressing matter of public order.

Last but by no means least was the contrast between the way in which 'we' and 'they' lived. The Bolshevik revolution had triumphed in the name of a classless proletarian society determined to root out aristocratic privilege. It succeeded in this task, but only to substitute another privileged group for the old aristocracy. It was tragic that the Soviet Union, which was founded in the name of egalitarianism and love and brotherliness, should become the land of privilege and hate and police-state cruelty.

Societies turn unstable when distribution of incomes is too uneven. Revolutions like those of 1789 and 1917 and 1985 have usually broken out when the top decile of privilegentsia is more than, say, fifteen times richer than the mass of population. In stable countries like the United States, Japan, China and all West Europe, the after-tax incomes of the richest decile in the inter-war (1945-85) years were rarely more than seven to eight times the incomes of those even on welfare relief. In the Soviet Union, because of the system of buying goods through special shops, the top 2 to 3 per cent of the privilegentsia had after-tax living standards more than fifteen times those of the ordinary toiler. They have paid a terrible price for it.

Such was the situation, in general outline, in which the Soviet imperial system disintegrated. So much effort has been applied over the years, however, to the falsification of the historical and philosophical background to this gigantic and cruel swindle, that a little further reflection on what lay behind it, and how it developed, may not be out of place. The simple fact was that the Soviet Empire was destroyed by its own inner contradictions, under an inexorable historical dialectic whose existence Marxists had long suspected but apparently never fully understood. The basic contradiction lay in the fundamental incompatibility of freedom and socialism. Marxism, offering such rich early promise to a humanity suffering under its own human limitations, had long shown itself to be romantic, unscientific and obsolete.

It was inevitable that Marx would be followed by a Lenin, whose observations on the tactics necessary in the Bolshevik revolution are revealing: 'We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, lawbreaking, withholding and concealing truth… We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn and the like towards those who disagree with us.'

Lenin in his turn, if a communist system were to survive, could not fail to be followed by a Stalin, in a dictatorship marked by merciless repression and wholesale butchery. How many people, to help stabilize the regime, were killed under Stalin? Twenty million? Fifty million? A hundred million? Bukovsky puts it at rather more than fifty.

In the last eighty years of Tsarist rule, up to 1917, some seventeen people, in what were thought to be fairly turbulent times, had been executed every year. The Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, in a report on their work in 1918 and 1919, recorded that in those two years more than one thousand people a month had been executed by them without trial.

But it was not moral squalor that undid Marxist-Leninism in the end. The system was not undermined by its essential fraudulence, though that was plain enough. What killed Marxist-Leninism, and destroyed Soviet Russia, was simply that the doctrine had never been, and probably never could be, realized. It did not work.

The birth of the regime, in the October Revolution of 1917, is shrouded in the myth that this was the result of a vast popular movement which swept into power the rulers of its choice. The truth is very different.

The government from which the Bolsheviks unlawfully seized power in 1917, though it was weak and unpopular, had at least come into existence constitutionally and is now recognized to have been fairly representative of the people. The promises of the minority group who by force and fraud were able to overthrow it were certainly attractive. Besides equality, liberty and fraternity, they guaranteed power to the workers, land to the peasants and peace to the people. Every one of these promises was broken. Under Bolshevism, workers were never given anything but a nominal share in government. Real power in representative bodies, the Soviets, was soon taken over by the Party, to which any show of opposition was brutally crushed. Land was, in the early stages, distributed to peasants but very soon taken away into state ownership. Most people who found their living on the land were forced into collective farms. Huge numbers of the most capable and hard-working were physically eliminated. Solzhenitsyn's researches showed him that fifteen million peasants were transported to extermination in the two years 1929 and 1930 alone. As for peace, quite apart from the more famous rebellions such as those in Murom, Yaroslavl, Rybinsk and Arzamas, and Antonov's, with its centre in Tambov, which were all put down with the utmost savagery, the Communist Party had embarked upon a civil war against its own population which was to continue for half a century, a war in which the dead far outnumbered those of any other war in the whole history of mankind. In place of equality, liberty and fraternity, the hallmarks of an increasingly corrupt society were coercion, fear and distrust. Words themselves seemed to have acquired new meanings in a socialist context. Equality meant no more, as we have seen, than privileges for top Party bureaucrats, with their special shops, foreign travel, high salaries and luxurious homes. There were equal rights for all others, as Bukovsky has put it, to share a common misery, to accommodate themselves to a society they knew was totally corrupt, to stand for ever in queues or else to perish in a Gulag. The total alienation this produced between Party and people brought about in time a general disillusion with socialist aspirations.

By the 1970s hope had long given way to cynicism. A continuous process of petrification seemed to have overcome the bureaucratic machine, producing economic policies and political practice as dogmatic as they were inflexible. The general atmosphere had become one of stagnation. Workers, denied any real incentive, took little interest in their work. Virtues and abilities went unrecognized and certainly, unless they were applied to meeting the state's requirements, earned no promotion. Advancement depended upon conformity. Ideology penetrated the structure of the machine at every level but those who operated it had long since shed any adherence to truly socialist principles. The Party never comprised more than 10 per cent of the population of the Soviet Union and probably not one Party member in ten in 1970 still believed in communism. The process of candidacy for membership to the Party, in which the candidate had to satisfy one Party committee after another of his devotion to the CPSU, and give proof of it, became an elaborate exercise in falsehood.

The cumulative effect of all this on the Soviet economy was by the mid-1970s disastrous. Central planning imposed restrictions on local initiative in situations ill understood at the controlling centre. Local needs, in materials, equipment, spare parts, even roads, were either not known or disregarded. People in the localities made their own arrangements for some fictitious show of meeting planned targets.

The targets, constantly derided by the populace, always rose and were almost never met. Workers anxious to meet them, where any did, faced only the hostility of workmates. Low salaries and shortages stimulated theft. Factories and shops, if unwillingly, fed the black market, under which 30 per cent of the whole of the country's economy by 1983 was operating.

Peasants cultivated their own plots for subsistence, selling any surplus on the black market for the cash they needed. In 1981 it was calculated that these plots — 3 per cent of the totality of arable land — were producing half of all the agricultural output. State investment in the early 1980s to enable peasants to earn more money only resulted in their producing from the land what they themselves needed for their own purposes. Parts of the Soviet Union were in fact, in the early 1980s, approaching starvation. Only a loosening of control could correct this tendency but that would lead, as it had in Hungary, in the direction of a free market economy, which was a trend the system could not tolerate.

By 1985 the growth rate of GNP in the USSR was negative, with a positive growth rate in the population, by far the greater part of the increase being in non-Russian peoples. Pauperization was now a great and growing menace. Inflation, already high and always rising, could no longer be concealed by official manipulation. Within the Soviet Union more and more people were turning to religion, often in forms the state found sufficiently hostile to proscribe. The weaknesses built into the system from the start were beginning to destroy it.

The events of the August war in 1985 worked in two ways to bring matters to a head. The political leadership had long been discredited by developments in Poland. It was the first time a governing European Communist Party had been shown to be unable to cope with dissidence and ideological opposition. Moscow was faced with the choice between direct intervention by Red Army troops and the takeover of Polish security by the Soviet KGB, or recourse to Polish military government. The latter, chosen through old men's inertia rather than conscious decision, put off for a time the international outcry which Soviet military action would have caused, and partially evaded Soviet responsibility for Poland's debt. But it signalled the abdication of the Communist Party of Poland from the control of political life.

The enormity of this breach of ideology and tradition was not everywhere fully recognized in the West, which was accustomed to military takeovers in Latin America and the Middle East, and tended to regard them as a recurrent and unsurprising reaction by the forces of order faced with administrative or parliamentary chaos. But to doctrinal communists the implications were of a different order. The Party, the fountain-head of doctrine and decision, the network which made a certain rough and ready sense in a hopelessly over-centralized bureaucracy, had shown itself powerless, divided and incapable of decision. Solidarity may have been temporarily overcome in Poland, but in its downfall the movement won a famous victory by demonstrating that the Communist Party in a communist state was no longer the all-powerful guardian of the state's authority.

The shock waves of this ideological explosion flowed back into the Soviet Union, exposing even the CPSU to doubt, and seeming to enhance the potential of the Soviet military leadership, which it appeared might one day have to play a similar role to that of Poland. So it was doubly traumatic to those inside the hierarchies when the check to the Soviet advance in Europe demonstrated that the military leadership had feet of clay. They were seen to have made faulty assessments, to have failed to adapt to changing tactical circumstances, and to have based their plans on an operational doctrine geared exclusively to rapid and complete success. When this success was not entirely forthcoming, the military machine was stalled, and the only alternative was nothing more brilliant than a futile nuclear demonstration which could not hope to restore the lost momentum of the Soviet armed forces.

These reflections went far to explain the demoralization of the nerve centre of the Soviet apparatus which made it ripe for Duglenko's takeover. The popular disenchantment had simpler causes, the same as those of many earlier revolutions: empty bellies on one side of the privilege line and full ones on the other. The demands of the war on civil transport had exceeded plans and expectations. The peasants were hoarding stocks of food, as if aware of impending catastrophe, rather than taking it for sale to the towns. The great ones of the regime still found enough in their special shops, but for the man and woman in the street too little food was at last too much for their patience, and the acute shortages in many towns gave rise to riots and disorder which overwhelmed the security militia.

The food riots, which began in Moscow, soon spread to most major towns and cities. For a first-hand view of them in their earliest stages we turn to a local source. The following piece appeared in Russkaya MM in Paris in November 1985, filed by a special correspondent in Moscow.

“A figure, matronly but none the less imperious, appeared in the shop doorway. There were gold rings on her thick fingers.

“The shop will not be opening today,” she announced. “We have nothing in stock — no bread, no sausage — nothing. So just go away.”

A groan of disappointment rose out of the long queue which already stretched the length of several blocks from the shop door.

“But we've been waiting all night!”

“What will our children eat?”

After a few moments individual shouts began to merge into a continuous murmur of indignation. Nevertheless, the crowd's rage was short-lived. The queue broke up and people began to wander away. They were used to this.

“I've lived in this place for seventy years,” mumbled an untidy and toothless old man. “It's nothing but queues. A whole lifetime in queues.”

Suddenly a small boy's shrill voice rang out above the crowd, directed, it seemed, to the matronly figure.

“You're lying about the bread, fatty. Your car's just around the corner. I saw you carry three bags out to it in the night.”

There was a roar from the crowd. A hundred or so rushed around the corner to the car. Others ran back to the shop into the queue. They all wanted to believe that the shop would now open and everyone would be able to buy a loaf of bread. Those who had been at the back of the queue hurried to get to the front. Others who had been at the very doors of the shop insisted on having their old places back, whilst those from behind insisted that this was a new queue. There was pushing and scuffling as the crowd pressed forward. There was a sound of breaking glass. The shop window gave way. A dozen or so people found themselves flung into the shop. Some got to their feet and tried to get back on to the pavement, afraid of being accused of looting. But a score of hungry people had already burst through the broken window. The electric alarm bell went off, calling in vain for assistance. The crowd got noisier, for the shelves were empty. More pushed their way in. The door to the storeroom was broken down and its meagre contents were rapidly dispersed.

Those who had made for the fat woman's car realized that very soon nothing would be left inside the shop for them and decided to make the most of what was in the car. They broke the windows and hauled out bags with whole smoked sausages and bars of chocolate and even tins of caviar in them.

Shop windows were being smashed all along the street as crowds gathered. Militiamen appeared at the crossroads. They were greeted with a hail of stones and wisely withdrew. A crowd of several thousand was now on the rampage. These were hungry people with families to feed. The long grey streets echoed to their shouting.

None of the shops had anything much in stock except the liquor store, where there was vodka, beer, wine and champagne. Crates of bottles were carefully lifted out on to the street, without a bottle broken. The bottles passed from hand to hand along the street, everyone taking a swig in turn. But there was no food. No shop in the street had been left un-plundered, and still there was no food.

“Intourist!” shouted someone.

“Intourist!” The cry spread.

A menacing crowd surged across the bridge towards a great box-like hotel reserved for foreign visitors. This place had long been hated. To proclaim the successes of the communist regime “paradise zones” had been built for foreigners in many parts of the main towns, with splendid hotels, restaurants, shops, hospitals, sports stadia. The Party and the KGB carried out an intensive campaign to win “friends for communism” in these zones. Ordinary citizens were strictly barred from access to them. Amongst the people, especially old folk who could still remember the Tsarist regime, this was a source of great indignation. Why should they not have the right, in their own country, to go into the best restaurants, hotels and shops?

When war had first broken out, the hotels for foreigners in Moscow and the other towns had all been cordoned off by KGB detachments. All the foreigners in them were arrested and many were now being shot in the hotel cellars, with little or no enquiry as to whether they were friends or enemies. After all, there was nothing now to feed them on, and no one to guard them. Lorries had been heard the night before near the Metropole Hotel. They were carrying away the corpses of foreign citizens.

Hungry crowds of Muscovites assumed that the lorries were only making the usual nocturnal deliveries. The mob now came streaming from all parts of the city in search of food.

In the inner courtyard of the Metropole Hotel, prisoners from the Lefortovo prison, guarded by a small squad of mounted militiamen, had just finished loading corpses of foreign guests of the capital of communism into the lorries. At the head of the convoy a militia lieutenant on a horse gave the order to open the gates and started to walk his horse on through them. In front of him, advancing round the corner on to the square, came a solid wall of people armed with sticks, stones and chains. Along the way some had torn up iron railings and the long rods with their pointed ends bristled above the crowd like the pikes of a mediaeval army.

“Close the gates!” shouted the lieutenant. A couple of militiamen jumped to do so. But the crowd had already caught sight of the long grey vans in the courtyard, and a menacing roar filled the square.

“They've got bread there.”

“And meat!”

“Smoked fish!”

“Comrades!” shouted the officer, “there's nothing in the lorries. There's no food there!”

“Then why have you shut the gates?” they shouted back at him. “Give us the bread!”

Half a dozen mounted militiamen came hurrying to the officer's side. Three more quickly set up a machine-gun by the gates.

Just at that moment, a square-built red-haired lad poked the rump of the lieutenant's mount with a long spike. The horse reared up on its hind legs, throwing its rider. There was a howl of triumph, and a hail of stones deluged the militiamen. The crowd pressed forward, pulling off the antique gates and filling the inner courtyard. They broke into the lorries and tore off the tarpaulins.

“Bread!”

Bewilderment, disappointment, despair, hatred and horror filled the courtyard. Instead of bread they had found dead bodies. The thousands of people filling the square outside did not know what had happened in the courtyard but seemed to guess instinctively that something dreadful had been discovered.

To get a better view a few climbed up on to the statue of Karl Marx.

“Break the old bastard up,” came a call from the crowd. People nearby burst out laughing. Some who had managed to get hold of a metal post began bashing at the granite pedestal.

“That's no good. We'll have to pull him down.”

A thick wire cable was produced from somewhere and its end passed up to the people sitting on Marx's head. They wound the cable round his granite neck and threw down the end. It was eagerly seized and the huge grey granite block came tumbling down to the triumphant roar of the crowd.

“Lenin too!”

“And Dzerzhinski!”

The growing crowd had filled the square and now surged on to Red Square. The higher the dam, the louder the roar when it collapses. The more apparently tranquil the million tons of water held in by the dam, the more terrifying and destructive its force when it finally breaks out into freedom.

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 condition 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 more 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.

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.

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.