The Third World War: August 1985

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 battle-ground 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 over enormous 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 South-east 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?

For the time being the Communist Party apparatus and the secret police were strong enough to keep such movements in check. But their existence was enough to add powerfully to the worries of the central authorities, and to sharpen the arguments between those who thought the crisis should be heightened as a means of restoring order and obedience, and those who wanted to draw back from the over-extension which had already led Soviet Russia into so many troubles.

The Kremlin doves, who called themselves realists, used all these facts and all these arguments against the superpower status quo thesis of the nuclear hard-liners. What good would it do to get the United States to recognize a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and Siberia when the Soviet regime was no longer able to exert its influence in those areas? Even if the forces now facing NATO remained immune to reduction by agreement with the West there would still not be enough to hold down the previously subject peoples. Better to accept facts as they were, and to recognize the errors of a gigantism inherited from Tsarist dreams of empire and from the illusions of world revolution of some of the early Bolsheviks. (It was still impermissible to criticize Lenin by name.) Russian greatness had always been less of material things than of the spirit. Moreover, the pure doctrines of communism had been distorted by the needs of empire. Far from withering away, the state had been obliged to intensify its presence and its pervasiveness. Russians might be better off alone, without the lesser breeds whom they were finding it increasingly hard to keep in subordination.