The Third World War: August 1985

The really crushing blow came from an unexpected quarter, however. Soviet policy had always been at pains either to suppress or to appease any symptoms of independence of mind on the part of the Ukraine. Its enormous contribution to Soviet food supplies, its position in the front line of Soviet territory facing the West, bordering on Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, and its vast hydro-electric potential, had made it, after Russia proper, the most vital component of the Union. It had suffered more than any other republic from the actions of the Soviet state to obtain food supplies by force after the Revolution and from the subsequent persecution of the wealthier peasants. It had been rewarded after the devastation of the Second World War by being given, with Byelorussia to the north, a privileged but fictitious autonomy as a separate member of the United Nations.

Ukrainian nationalist sentiment had been repressed in 1966 in the Kiev trials of intellectuals and members of the Ukrainian Workers and Peasants Union. Their main crime had been to promote the idea of secession from the Soviet Union, a right enshrined in the Soviet Constitution. Repression had only diverted this sentiment into more powerful channels underground. Its modern exponents understood the axiom that successful revolutions begin at the top. They determined to make use of the one important freedom left to the inhabitants of the Ukraine — the access of individual Ukrainians to positions of power in the central apparatus of the Soviet Union. There had been several successful generals; now the favourite son of the Ukrainian nationalists was in the unlikely guise of a secret policeman.

After graduating from the police academy at Kiev in 1960, Vasyl Duglenko had been recommended to Khrushchev by some of the latter’s Ukrainian cronies, and transferred to the KGB headquarters in Moscow. Being still in a junior post he had managed to survive Khrushchev’s fall, and climbed up the precarious ladder of power to be Deputy Commandant, with special responsibility for the security of the Kremlin. He had retained close links with the nationalist cells in the Communist Party of the Ukraine and he had naturally placed a good number of fellow Ukrainians in suitable positions in the KGB, particularly in the Kremlin section.

So a powerful mechanism was in place, and the Minsk explosions provided the opportunity, and the necessity, for its use. Duglenko and his friends in the Ukrainian Party machine had no wish to take part in the last act of a Russian Gotterdammerung. Although they vaguely knew what was about to happen in Poland they saw no sure future in a separatist movement confined to the Ukraine. The central keep of the Soviet system had to be attacked.

At the centre they could join forces with the group of ‘doves’ already referred to in Chapter 24, whose influence had spread, with the worsening news from East and West, even among sections of the command of the armed forces. It would be vital to have some friends there if a coup was to survive its first dangerous hours.

This army group, small at first and of necessity conspiratorial, had decided even before the attack on Birmingham that nuclear war was not going to achieve Soviet objectives in the West, nor restore order in the East. Moreover, in the ensuing destruction of organized life in the Soviet Union the armed forces themselves were likely to disintegrate. A deliberate return of army units to the Russian heartlands offered better hope for a future system of orderly government in which the armed forces would have an effective role, and its commanders a tolerably secure life. Their ideas probably did not include so radical a break-up of the Soviet Union as the Ukrainians secretly envisaged. They would have been in closer agreement on the need to relax the dead hand of centralized control on the economic life of the country, not in the interests of laissez-faire, but in order to restore efficiency and come nearer to matching the agricultural and industrial productivity of the West, not to speak of China-Japan.

As it turned out, both parties, keeping their ultimate objectives to themselves, were able to establish discreet links for the tactical purpose of overcoming the probable insistence of the hard-liners in the Central Committee on committing nuclear suicide.

There was in any case no time to be lost. The Politburo was due to meet on 22 August to decide on further action in the event that the Americans did not comply with the ultimatum to join in talks on maintaining the status quo.