The Third World War (45 page)

To tell the story of the mounting of the United Nations Relief and Repatriation Organization (
UNRRO
), which soon took over from the United States in the concentration and maintenance of remnants of Soviet forces deployed in Africa and the Middle East, and then set in hand the long and complex business of getting the men (and women too) back to their homes, is no part of our present task. The operation still goes on as we write, having had to face more difficulties than those confront-ing the United Nations Displaced Persons Organization, set up at the same time in Europe. No history of the time, however, would be complete without reference to one of the least tractable problems to emerge in the immediate aftermath of the war. There will be traces of its impact in Africa and the Middle East fora long time to come. It will be many years, for example, before the last weapon brought by the Soviet Union into Africa and the Middle East in the chapter of the world’s history which ended so abruptly in 1985, ceases in one hand or another to serve a purpose.

The elimination of Soviet support, direct or by proxy, heralded the end of any further external intervention. The security of South Africa was assured by the success other own armed forces in resisting and defeating tactical attack, with some help from the efforts of the US Navy. These efforts, though aimed directly at the peripheral operations of the Soviet Union, also had the result that both the Soviet proxy fighters and the indigenous guerrillas were largely cut off from the sinews of war. The end to the strategic external battle was far indeed from bringing to an end the only sort of struggle of enduring concern to the Africans—the internal one. Bitter battles between Angola and her neighbours, and within Angola, were matched by frontier incidents in Zaire and a renewal of the disruption of Mozambique. South Africa, though everywhere penetrated, held firm at the core. Her front-line adversaries, while clinging to the idea of confrontation, began to look to their own internal welfare. Far from a Confederation of Africa South coming into being and flourishing, a de-federation of those dedicated to set it up was already in progress.

The impotence of the Soviet proxies in Southern Africa had been demonstrated. The success of Iran in the Persian Gulf and southern Arabia had been such that even before the nuclear exchange in Europe precipitated the end she was already concentrating forces on her northern borders for the invasion of the Soviet Union. The aimless manoeuvrings of the Egyptian Army on the shores of the Red Sea signified little. Soviet initiatives on the outskirts of the main battle had been stifled and a great strategic prize retained firmly in the grasp of the United States. If this success did not in itself ensure that the Western Allies would win the war in Europe against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact it made two important contributions. By stabilizing a situation in the Middle East to the advantage of the West, and securing the oil flow along the sea routes, the US had already gone some way to ensuring that the war, particularly if it were to be prolonged, would not be lost. By setting up a situation in which Soviet initiatives on the periphery were almost from the beginning seen to fail it hastened the general realization that the military might of the
USSR
was very far indeed from being invincible, and thus added to the growing weight of encouragement to its enemies nearer the centre.

As the Soviet offensive ground to a halt in Europe and the war at sea emphasized not only the geographical disadvantages of the Soviet Union as a naval power but also the misdirection of its efforts to overcome them, various signs of political instability began to appear, both inside and outside the Kremlin. The purpose of the war had after alt been largely political—to exploit the conventional weakness of the West in order to humiliate the US and to re-establish absolutism in Eastern Europe as the only safeguard against dissidence and fragmentation. The very statement of these war aims demonstrated the hollowness and imbalance of Soviet power. The military machine had been built up to an unparalleled size to buttress a political performance which was almost uniformly unsuccessful. The Soviet Union had been unable to take part in genuine detente because the appeal

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of Soviet communism to the masses either inside or outside the Soviet Union had proved mainly negative. Force, or the threat of force, had been necessary to counter the greater political attractiveness of the West and fissiparous tendencies within the Warsaw Pact. Political cohesion had failed to develop in Eastern Europe. Even the approach to power of communist parties in the West had not increased Soviet influence there; it had merely set an example of dissidence for communist countries in the East.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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