The Third World War: August 1985

This incident was easily presented to the Warsaw Pact countries as what some at least of the Soviet hawks had been waiting for, the ‘attack’ by the West on a communist state. It was the momentum of events, however, much more than the actual incident itself, that now took charge. Soviet forces were joined in battle with troops of the United States. This was the stupendous, almost unbelievable event that brought into brutal reality what had so long been feared. The Soviet Union and the United States were in combat action against each other on a battlefield. The chocks were out. The huge military mass of the USSR was already beginning to move down the slipway. There could now for the Soviet Union be no possible alternative to the launching of the full invasion, already well prepared, of Western Europe, and the advance to the Rhine, for the destruction of the Atlantic Alliance, and the removal of the threat from US ‘imperialism’, operating from the forward base of Federal Germany.

CHAPTER 10: Soviet Planning

The year 1984 had seen some difference of view in the Kremlin on the most profitable method of exploiting the USSR’s very considerable position of military strength. The difference was in the last resort no more than a matter of emphasis, but it had been evident for some time and was not without importance in the subsequent development of events.

The older men, all with experience of the Second World War, continued to see in Germany the most persistent and dangerous threat to the long-term security of the Soviet Union. They fully recognized the enormous strength and influence of capitalist America, the other great superpower, and the potential danger it embodied. Unless the United States disintegrated under the stresses of capitalist contradictions, of which it had to be admitted there was at present little sign, there would at some time have to be a reckoning with her. But the danger from a re-armed, industrially powerful West Germany, eager for revenge, was both more immediate and more real, both in itself and in its catalytic influence on the countries of the West. These older men tended to see external problems more in terms of Europe and its extension in North America than of the outer world. They were at least as much Russian as Marxist-Leninist, and in some cases more so.

The younger men, none of whom had been old enough to take any part in the Second World War, thought more in terms of the rest of the world than of Europe, and even there, though they were fully alive to the danger from Germany, did not regard it as the whole core of the external problem. They were uncompromising Party men, born and brought up under the system, completely devoted to it and wholly conscious that it was the sole condition of their being who and what they were. They were at least as much Marxist-Leninist as Russian, and in some cases more so.

Such difference as there was, it must be repeated, was only one of emphasis. There was no disagreement on the persistent threat to the system from the capitalist-imperialist world, with West Germany playing a major role under the leadership of the United States. Nor was there disagreement on the high probability of a future threat from China, on the dangers of heresies in national communism, on the absolute need to keep the Party supreme and watertight, or on any other fundamental issue. There was also complete agreement on the inevitability of the ultimate triumph of the system everywhere, on the necessity to exploit every external opportunity to advance the Soviet interest, on the wisdom of tactical manipulation in the short term to secure greater gains in the long, and on the paramount necessity for a dominant position of military strength abroad — at the cost if necessary of damping down progress at home — as a fulcrum for the lever of Soviet political power.

The differences lay chiefly in the choice of areas of exploitation. The old guard were inclined to look towards the centre, towards the manifest contradictions of developed capitalist societies and the unstable relationships between them. The younger men looked more to the periphery, to the opportunities offered among developing societies and the relations not only between these societies but also between their own developing world and more developed countries.

There was no shadow of disagreement on the necessity to neutralize West Germany at some time, by military force if necessary. Centralists put this higher on their list of priorities, perhaps, than the others, and might have been more inclined to pre-emptive action. It was agreed policy to impair the coherence of the Atlantic Alliance wherever possible; to reduce or offset the military strength of NATO by any means that offered; and to maintain a military capability at sufficient strength and readiness to ensure that any crisis in central Europe, up to and including full-scale warfare, could be managed to Soviet advantage.