Armageddon (25 page)

“You are obviously speaking about the Russians.”

“You’re reading me loud and clear.”

“I’m not one of these automatic liberals who takes a fixed position, but let’s lay it on the line, General. You’re a Red baiter from the year one.”

“Hear me out and see if I’m a Red baiter.”

Sean had stepped into Hansen’s trap! What if Hansen proved his case? The general knew all along there were senses of duty and points of logic that Sean would respond to.

“I don’t want to hear it, General.”

“They have men of fanatical devotion beyond our comprehension of dedication. They have them by the hundreds of thousands who perform like robots. I lay awake nights in fear of a mortal weakness in us. I fear our sons are too fat, too lazy, too complacent to sacrifice and to serve in silence. It takes no genius to figure out what is going to happen in Berlin and there are too damned few of us willing to believe it or face up to the facts. Our country is asleep. Until it wakes up I need every Sean O’Sullivan I can get in Berlin if we are to survive.”

Sean was dumbstruck by the urgency of the outburst. Could he walk from this room now without even listening to the man’s case?

He nodded slowly for General Hansen to begin....

Chapter Thirty-five

G
ENERAL
A
NDREW
J
ACKSON
H
ANSEN
first came into contact with the Russians at the close of the First World War in the year 1920. After the Russian Revolution and counterrevolution there was an acute famine condition. As a young officer, he became part of the Hoover Commission, which fed ten million Russians a day.

Hansen contended that the Russian Revolution was not much of a revolution. The Czar’s house was rotten from within from centuries of feudalism, corruption, class rule, church abuse, failure to industrialize, failure to humanize. The rotten house needed but a hearty shove to collapse. History has been conveniently rewritten by the Communists for the world to believe that the revolution was a Communist-led people’s uprising. That is not true.

The Russian people, Hansen said, both by nature and by historical precedent, have proven that they are neither politically inquisitive nor revolutionary in spirit. They have tolerated a police state in one form or another from the origins of their history, for some twelve solid centuries. They have lived out their entire history in complete adjustment to police-state terror with little or no protest.

Hansen liked to point to Pavlov’s experiments with dogs. The great Russian scientist experimented to show how completely an animal could be conditioned. Such an animal could be trained to perform certain feats to ward off hunger, cold, and privation. Hansen believed that in a sense, Pavlov was experimenting with the Russian people themselves. Human history has given few examples of a people who can be so thoroughly conditioned as the Russians. When the pressures reach a critical stage, another bone is thrown them and they will remain quiet. Indeed, with pitifully few exceptions the Russians are magnificently trained animals who will not permit an alien, creative, free, or contradictory idea to function within their minds. They adjust within that framework of what they are allowed to think by their peers.

In recalling the history of the ending of the first war, Russia was weary, bloody, beaten, and hungry. The moment was ripe for a gathering of divergent political parties to unite and push in the Czar’s rotten house. This was the so-called revolution.

Among those divergent groups was the Communist Party. When the new government was formed the Communists were not a majority. However, they were the most tightly knit, the most ruthlessly led, the most dynamic, and the most deliberate in their ultimate goals.

In the confusion that followed the flight of the Czar, the Communists made a naked seizure of power. This was not a popular movement of the people, which they later claimed, nor was it particularly understood in most reaches of that vast land.

After a time, scattered remnants of the Czarist regime got their second wind, and along with Ukrainian and White Russian Nationalists, who hated “Mother Russia,” staged the counterrevolution against the Communists.

These were the “Whites.” The White Counter-Revolution was doomed from its inception. As the Whites reconquered parts of Russia, they reinstated the nobility and the corrupt system that had led to the collapse of the Czar in the first place. They tried to beat a dead horse to life.

The Reds, therefore, fell heir to the people by the default of the Whites. It was the lesser of the evils at the time. The Communists, moreover, did not sell the war-weary people on any lofty idealisms of Marx. The Red slogan was simple and understandable ... Bread! ... Peace! ... Land!

The Communists made a separate peace with Germany, withdrawing Russia from the war, and deserting their former allies. France, Britain, and the United States had both troops and equipment on Russian soil, including an Allied-trained Czechoslovakian division. Angered at Russia’s separate peace and committed to guard their hordes of supplies, the Allies loosely supported the ill-fated White

Counter-Revolution. For this alleged Allied treachery, the Western world earned the everlasting hatred of the Russians.

Poland, which had been partitioned into oblivion before the First World War re-emerged once more as a nation. Poland made an ill-advised move, leaping on the back of the shaky Russians in 1920, the latest in a series of wars between old enemies. However, the Red Army had gained the people’s support and defeated the Poles. Poland fell into the same circle of hatred, being lumped with the West.

One of the first things Hansen learned when he came to starving Russia in 1920 was that the Russians were Asians. Western culture had been imported into only a few of the larger cities. Most of Russia and the other captive states that comprised the Soviet Union simply did not think or act like the West.

From the beginning of the Communist regime the Russians made it clear that they would take Western food, Western long-term loans, Western credits, Western trade, Western recognition. There was never so much as a small thank-you for any of it. For, the Communists made it clear from the first that they intended to remake the world in their own image.

Hansen felt that this, in essence, was more dangerous than the Nazis, who wanted to conquer only in the name of Germany. The Russian aim was more awesome. The Communist believes he has an answer for the entire world. The German arises violently and is beaten down the same way. But the Russians have oriental patience. They waited a decade for political recognition and they will wait a century to achieve the ultimate aim. A stalemate for a decade does not matter, for the machinery is always at work, always plodding on. They are convinced that their final victory is inevitable.

The Russian people knew that all invasions from Napoleon to Hitler had come from the West. Any pact they made for a temporary convenience was for their own benefit. Being allies with the West against the Nazis in no way impeded their
other
goals against the rest of mankind.

Narrowing the immediate Russian objectives was simple. The first goal was the German working class, the true birthplace of Marxism. Control of the German working class was tantamount to control of Europe ... an old and true axiom. Hansen felt that Russia intended to capture and communize Germany as their first step against all of Europe.

But ... in order to capture Germany ... first, Poland, which sits between them, must go. It was in the maneuverings about Poland during the war that led Hansen to his fears.

Austria, Spain, and Czechoslovakia had been sold out to Hitler by Western ineptness. When Hitler applied the pressure to Poland, Stalin was convinced that the West would also sell out the Poles. To complicate matters, Poland refused Russian help.

So, assured of Western timidity again, knowing Polish hatred of Russia, Stalin thought it foolish to gamble further with the West.

Instead, he made a pact with Hitler. Hitler wanted the pact because Poland was next on his timetable. In the event France and Britain should honor their commitment to defend Poland Hitler did not want to risk the possibility of a two-front war. So, he set out to “neutralize” Russia. Stalin, with a clear understanding, made himself a shrewd bargain. He got half of Poland, the Baltic States, and a clear field to clean up some defensive positions in Finland, and what is more, purchased precious time to build for the attack he knew would come, sooner or later, from Germany.

In 1939 Poland was attacked. By agreement, Russia knifed Poland in the back and took the eastern half of the country. Many Poles escaped. Some got to England, where they formed the Polish Government-in-Exile. This was the universally recognized body speaking for a sovereign Poland.

A year and a half after Poland’s demise, Russia was attacked by Germany and thereby became the “official” ally of England. From the outset it was a strange alliance. An alliance by default ... a shotgun wedding ... and a temporary arrangement of mutual convenience.

From the very start the Russians showed the coldness and aloofness they held for their allies. There was never a thank-you for the convoys of Allied material which poured into Russia through the suicide Murmansk run. The death of ships and men in the icy waters of the Barents Sea became a legend of horror. Those who survived and landed in Murmansk and Archangel were greeted by a further coldness to match the waters.

But, the Allies kept their silence, for Russia was drawing hundreds of thousands of casualties which might have been their own.

As part of the inside diplomatic maneuverings, Russia recognized the Polish Government-in-Exile in London known as the London Poles. This took place in 1941. Russia made this recognition in order to begin pressure on the West for promises of postwar border changes in Poland.

For the sake of window dressing, the Russians went so far as to “officially” dissolve the Comintern, the instrument of international Communism. This was done to pacify the Allies. Hansen was certain, from intelligence reports, that the Comintern in reality never ceased to exist for a moment. He was positive that an intense training of foreign agents to seize a number of countries was always active and now ready to move, particularly in Germany, Poland, and the Slavic countries.

Roosevelt and Churchill retained a certain timidity about shoving Stalin because of the fact that Russia bore the brunt of the war. Stalin, however, had no such inhibitions. He continued unceasing pressure for the West to agree to postwar settlements. These he could now get “legally.” The other type “settlements” would be obtained later.

The London Poles protested Stalin’s proposed postwar border changes. In one of the great paradoxes of the war, the British and Americans kept the London Poles from becoming too boisterous out of fear of offending Stalin.

This “bothersome” Polish question exploded in 1943.

When Poland was attacked by Germany in 1939 many Polish officers and men chose to flee to Russia as the lesser of evils and throw themselves on the tender mercy of the Soviet Union. Many thousands of Polish officers were interned with the hopes of fighting another day.

Fifteen thousand of these Polish officers were put into camps in a place called the Katyn Forest. From the moment the Russians interned them, they were never heard from again. Hansen, who worked very closely with the British, knew the London Poles had made innumerable demands to know what became of these officers. The Russians never gave them an answer.

In 1943 the German armies advanced into Russia and came upon the Katyn Forest. They claimed to have found the bones of these 15,000 “missing” Polish officers in common graves, the victims of a massacre. The Germans invited the International Red Cross to investigate and the London Poles joined that demand for an investigation.

The Russians became indignant and broke off recognition of the London Poles. Again, Britain and America tried to calm the pesky Poles and the charge was never allowed to be investigated.

Hansen reckoned that 15,000 human pawns were slaughtered because these Polish officers stood as a potential force against Russian aspirations in postwar Poland.

Later, when the Russians recaptured Katyn, they conducted their own closed investigation and said it was really the Germans who had murdered the Polish officers.

There were, of course, two sides and two stories in the Katyn massacres, but Hansen believed that history had proved the Russians capable of just such a slaughter. They had already made it clear they were going to have a Poland they could dominate on their border as a buffer against future invasion from the West.

There were precedents to show they would murder for political gain. Hansen reckoned the Russians had killed in excess of ten million of their own citizens in twenty-five years under Communism. Despite the frostings of peace and brotherhood coming from joint conferences he felt them neither peace-loving, kind, gentle, nor caring much for the brotherhood of man.

After the Russian Revolution the Communists first liquidated the upper class, from the Czar on down, and the nationalists of Ukrainia and White Russia, with the dispatch of the guillotine days after the French Revolution. Hansen knew of this from firsthand observation.

At the end of the 1920s Stalin initiated his collectivization of the farmlands. There were millions of prosperous or semiprosperous peasants in a class known as the Kulaks. Terror squads from Moscow swooped into the farmlands with orders to “liquidate the Kulaks as a class.” History will never record the true number of Kulak families murdered on the spot or shipped to Siberia as slaves. Certainly it was no less than five million men, women, and children. Losses in crops ran in millions of bushels, millions of acres. Losses of cattle, goats, sheep, pigs ran into tens of millions. The animal losses seemed to annoy Stalin and his planners far more than the human losses.

Hansen estimated from all his sources of information that some thirteen million Russian or Soviet citizens had been forced into slave labor during the two and a half decades of Communism.