The Third World War: August 1985

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 For a society aiming at middle-class consumer values the dictatorship of the proletariat was in any case rather an out-of-date concept.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.