The Third World War - The Untold Story (18 page)

Citizens of the Soviet Union, as the 1970s moved on into the 1980s, may well by now have come to accept their lot with resignation, without any confidence, or even any hope, that it would ever change for the better. It would be wrong to suppose, as many did in the West, that they were also wholly lacking in awareness of what went on in the other world, outside the closed system which constituted their own. In addition to what came in through radio broadcasts from outside, the circulation of information within the Soviet Union itself was a good deal freer than was commonly realized in the West. It was certainly much freer than the Communist Party liked. A country in which a huge black market flourishes, however, is not one in which information does not circulate, especially when the black market is not only permitted by the authorities but even, as compensation for their own extraordinary ineptitude, actively encouraged, though the circulation of information, of course, is not. Though the concept of public opinion as a political force in a communist state is hardly valid, it was inevitable that in the Soviet Union, in the four or five years before the war, there was not only widespread awareness of what was going on in the outside world but strong currents of political opinion flowing from it. The boycott of the Olympic games made a far greater impression than was commonly realized abroad and the attempts by the Party to play down its effects and claim an outstanding public relations success produced in Moscow a veritable flood of the sick jokes whose volume and venom had long been the only reliable index of public reaction to events. The invasion of Afghanistan aroused wide interest and deep unpopularity and, as it dragged on with no satisfactory end even remotely in sight, it was more clearly recognized as a blunder of the first magnitude. The disposal of the dead in the Afghan campaign threw a particularly interesting light on popular attitudes. At first they were flown home for burial, but as the flow continued and the numbers grew this was seen to be unwise. Public concern in the Asiatic republics, from which most of the first troops engaged in Afghanistan came, was so marked (particularly in Kazakhstan) that from mid-1981 the practice ceased. The dead were now buried in the country where they died.

It will long be argued, with the benefit of hindsight, whether the West should have made greater efforts in the early 1980s to take advantage of the Soviet Union’s difficulties, for example in Afghanistan and Poland. In the former, massive supply of arms to the ‘rebels’, or the active suborning of Soviet troops, would have required a greater degree of collusion by Pakistan than it was wise for that country to give. Moreover, Afghan disunity was almost as powerful a source of weakness as lack of heavy weapons. The Polish case too was a genuine puzzle. Could the West have saved Solidarity? After the imposition of military government, how far was it in the Western interest to do economic damage to the country in the hope that the Government and not the people would suffer, and so be led to allow the progress towards democracy to be resumed?

Ineffective though pre-war efforts in the West had been to exploit Soviet difficulties, they had some interesting by-products. Very little was done in peacetime by Western governments, however tempting the opportunities, to prepare for intervention in the internal affairs of Warsaw Pact countries if war should break out. It was too risky for the CIA or other such agencies to make any large-scale preparations and their governments in general warned them not to try. The period of hostilities when war did break out was too short to organize much more than the support of subversion by the massive injection by air of supplies. What governments had failed to do, however, was in large part made up for by the efforts of those active individuals who had pressed hard for better exploitation of opportunities to harm the Soviet system in peace. Governments in the West found ready to their hand organizations, personnel, training arrangements and even stocks of equipment brought together by activist expatriates of the Baltic States and the Ukraine, and other constituent republics of the Soviet Union, let alone of Warsaw Pact countries. Those in the West whose national origins and interests lay in these countries flooded in, when war threatened, to offer their services. There were many more than could be used during the actual period of hostilities, but good use was made of some, particularly in Poland, the Baltic States and the Ukraine. More useful still were some of those exiles, driven out by communism, who on the collapse of the Soviet Union were more than willing to return to their own countries and contribute to their recovery. Since these often included many of the ablest men and women in their own nations, some with very high capabilities as administrators, their availability in the establishment of successor regimes was invaluable.

The plan which was finally accepted in the Kremlin for the invasion of Western Europe by forces of the Warsaw Pact envisaged a swift occupation of the Federal Republic of Germany, to be completed within ten days, followed by consolidation of a front along the Rhine and the negotiation of a ceasefire with the United States from a position of strength.

There were several very important reasons why the USSR should seek to secure the Rhine stop line with the least possible delay. The first was the need to achieve a decisive military success and a strong and clearly defined political base for negotiation before trans-Atlantic reinforcement could develop a truly dangerous momentum. The second was to give the West as little time as possible to resolve doubts and hesitations over the initial release of nuclear weapons - for it was naturally assumed that the West would need them first, to offset the conventional superiority deployed against them by the Warsaw Pact. A third and scarcely less important reason lay in the necessity to reduce to a minimum the strain of prolonged operations upon the coherence of the Warsaw Pact, particularly where those countries were concerned which, up to the war, had been described as the Pact’s Northern Tier - the German Democratic Republic, Poland and Czechoslovakia. The first two of these reasons are explored in the next chapter. The third merits attention here.

The armed forces of each of these three countries, though all had been set up (
ab initio
in the GDR, in reconstituted form in Poland and Czechoslovakia) under close Soviet control, differed radically. All armed forces, even when they are raised within an externally imposed straitjacket, reflect the ethos and outlook of parent nations. The part to be played in the Third World War by the armies of the Northern Tier can hardly be said, in retrospect, to have been surprising.

A role was planned for these armies, and initial tasks assigned, in a swift and violent invasion of Western Europe which was to be speedily successful. The plan was only one of many contingency operational plans kept constantly updated in the Kremlin, but it was of the highest importance. It was inevitably the plan which to the three countries concerned was of more importance than any other.

Each of their armies had been organized, equipped, trained and oriented in the basically offensive mode of the Soviet armed forces and integrated into them as closely as differing circumstances allowed. The impatience of certain older and more doctrinaire officers of the Soviet High Command at the apparent unattainability of total integration was understood in the Defence Committee of the Politburo, its most important element, but had to be restrained. The armed forces of these three countries remained, as events proved, very different, each retaining marked characteristics derived from different parentage and upbringing.

The army of the GDR (the National People’s Army or NPA) emerged as a totally new creation in the 1960s. It was always the smallest of the three, at little more than 120,000 strong at the outbreak of war, of which half were eighteen-month conscripts. It had no military tradition of its own (the re-emergence in the 1970s of historic distinctions between Saxon and Prussian units was of no great significance) and was entirely subservient to a Party regime whose interests were closely consonant with those of the Soviet Union. Fear of a threat from West Germany, carefully cultivated by the USSR, was helpful during the formative period, but
Ostpolitik
and detente reduced the value of this threat as a bonding material, and defection from the NPA to the West in the 1970s was considerable. This was rarely found, it must be said, among officers above the rank of lieutenant colonel, which was evidence of the degree of reward and encouragement offered to the military by the Party. While the two tank and four motor-rifle divisions of the NPA were to be assigned a fully forward role in the offensive of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (GSFG) in August 1985, the reliability of the NPA (not so much in the officer cadre, particularly at higher levels, as in the rank and file) was always to the Soviet High Command a cause for uneasiness. When the lightning successes of Warsaw Pact forces over NATO, upon which the loyalty of the East German NPA within the Pact depended, even more than it did with others, failed to materialize and there was civil commotion, starting with sabotage and violence first of all in Dresden on 11 August, it was not thought prudent to use the NPA, at least in the first instance, to suppress it. The
Bereitschaftspolizei
of the Ministry of the Interior were called in first and then, when the rioting spread on 14 August to Leipzig, a
Wach-regiment
under the orders of the Ministry of State Security moved in. When disorder spread further, Soviet permission was, with the utmost reluctance, sought by the GDR to withdraw NPA regular troops to suppress it, and permission was as reluctantly given. The three NPA motor rifle regiments brought back for the purpose on 17/18 August proved unmanageable. Orders were disobeyed, desertion was rife, officers were shot. The Party was still supreme in the GDR but from now on it was progressively less able to govern.

How different was the case of Poland. The Polish armed forces, having refused in 1970 to intervene against the near-rebellious civil population, felt obliged to take complete control of the country in 1981. It is still not clear whether General Jaruzelski imposed martial law because in his view as a Polish patriot it was the only alternative to an outright imposition of Soviet administration, or because, as a communist, he genuinely believed that Solidarity’s power was incompatible with the orderly government of the state. Whatever the answer to this riddle, the assumption of power had two effects on the Polish Army. Its manpower was deeply committed to the maintenance of internal security, and so could make less contribution to an external military operation. On the other hand, fighting West Germans might be more attractive to many Polish soldiers than repressing Solidarity. In fact they were soon to have the worst of both worlds, when it became clear that one of the Polish Army’s main roles in the war would be to prevent Polish partisans from cutting the Soviet supply lines across Polish territory into Federal Germany.

The threat to Polish national independence posed by the FRG, heavily emphasized by the Soviets, had become increasingly less credible during the 1970s. There was little else to bind Polish military interests to the USSR in its obsession with a blind hostility to NATO. The unwillingness of the Soviet military to treat their Polish colleagues as professionals of the same standing (which, at equivalent levels, they undoubtedly were) and the reluctance of Moscow to furnish the Polish Army with modern equipment did little to bridge the inevitable gap between nations that had been more often enemies than friends. On the Soviet side, moreover, the tendency of the Polish military to allow professionalism to take precedence over ideology was in the late seventies arousing increasing uneasiness.

Poland could never, therefore, have been regarded by the Soviets at that time as a wholly reliable military ally. One condition alone did more than anything else to keep Poland lined up with the Warsaw Pact plans for a swift invasion of Western Germany. This was the certainty that if Poland came out of the arrangement, a Warsaw Pact-NATO battle would be fought not on German territory but on Polish, a swift, decisive invasion of western Germany was infinitely preferable. In the event the invasion though swift was not decisive and Soviet fears about the military reliability of Polish troops were soon realized. When the Soviet lines of communication through Poland became increasingly disrupted from partisan activity, plentifully and ably supplied (though with very considerable losses) by NATO air forces, the move of Polish formations back from Germany to look after the security of communications inside Poland was a total failure The mutiny in Poznan on 17 August in one of Poland s eight mechanized division, the first formation to be sent home, for internal security duties, was the signal for a general showdown with the Soviet high Command.

In Czechoslovakia, the events of August 1968 not only put an end to all hopes of steady progress towards the eventual total identification of Czechoslovak and Soviet interests. They also virtually destroyed the Czechoslovak People’s Army (CPA).

Early hopes of a fusion between Czech and Soviet interests were never, in fact, wholly justified. It is true that the USSR could regard Czechoslovakia, in the early years of the inter-war period, as the most pro-Soviet of all its new client states. The Czechoslovak elections of 1947 were not conducted, as many have alleged, under duress from the Red Army, which was at that time quite thin on the ground in Czechoslovakia. The setting up of a communist government was in the first instance the result of a more or less respectable democratic process, if somewhat tarnished by the coup in 1948, and was, ironically enough, almost as decisive as the massive rejection of communism by the Austrians in the free elections which the Soviets had so unwisely permitted the year before. In the following years the steady re-emergence of Czech national sentiments, of anti-Soviet opinion and of restlessness with external repression of free institutions, resulted, in Dubcek’s time, in a level of dissatisfaction with Soviet hegemony too dangerous in itself and too likely to spread infection outside Czech frontiers to be disregarded.