The Third World War: The Untold Story

The noise of these explosions, in a continuous roar, lasted for more than thirty seconds at Dzerzhinsk, for example, some 30 kilometres away to the south-west and an important centre of local administration with a key railway station, as it also did at Borisov, about the same distance away from Minsk on the direct railway line to Moscow in the north-east. Damage at this range was relatively slight, though very many windows were broken, but the terrifying burning fiery furnace, with its stupefying noise, stunned all who saw it, even those who saved their sight by turning away.

The attack came quite without warning and though there were shelters available for at least a part of the population, very few people were in them. Of the one and a quarter million inhabitants of the city of Minsk, some 50,000 were killed almost instantly. Some, so badly burnt in the first thermal pulse as to have no hope of survival, were mercifully killed in the blast wave which almost immediately followed, while many were buried alive in the piles of masonry from buildings thrown down by the shock.

Something that could be seen from near Moscow, some 600 kilometres' distant, was even more clearly manifest in important places nearer to Minsk itself. It was visible in Riga, capital of Latvia to the north-west, in Kiev in the south-east and in Warsaw some 450 kilometres to the south-west. The pillar of fire was seen and the rumble of the detonations clearly heard at Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, only 170 kilometres away, while in the important Lithuanian city of Kaunas, 100 kilometres further off, the disturbance in the sky was also clearly visible and the rumble of the bursts was plainly heard. The inhabitants of Bobruisk, also in Belorussia and only 150 kilometres away from Minsk, were shocked and terrified. Much was seen and heard in Smolensk, Vitebsk, Gomel and Brest, on the Belorussian/Polish border. In all these important places, each with its own political interests, there was confusion and uncertainty and everyone was gripped by a fear approaching panic as to what might happen next.

In the suburbs of Minsk, where there were still wooden buildings, something approaching a firestorm was developing, generated in the tremendous currents of air caused by the impact of the blast wave. It was scarcely possible that any living thing could survive in the inner part of the city and if any did it could not be for long. On the outskirts burnt and blinded people, many bleeding badly from the effects of flying glass and other debris carried through the air by winds approaching hurricane force, all in a severe state of shock, were stumbling about in a forlorn search for parents or children and for medical assistance of which there was no hope at all. Others whose injuries prevented movement or who were pinned in wreckage from which there was no possibility of their rescue lay where they were in a state of stunned despair.

Soviet provision for civil defence had been held up in the early 1980s as something to admire and imitate. It is true that there were in the neighbourhood of Minsk concentrations of civil defence expertise and equipment at places like Borisov, Bobruisk and Baranovichi. All available resources were mobilized and moved in towards the disaster area. The authorities, however, were less concerned with the alleviation of personal distress than with the control of the movement of refugees, pathetic crowds of people who came pouring out from the outskirts of Minsk and its neighbouring regions along the roads towards Orsha and Bobruisk, people still alive, unlike those in the city, but suffering greatly from burns, injuries from falling masonry and a thousand other sources of distress. Almost all came on foot. By the outbreak of war the private ownership of motor vehicles in Minsk was at the level normal in Soviet cities, that is, at about that found among black South Africans. The few that there were had, of course, at once been requisitioned. Here and there in this heart-rending horde there would be a military or official motor vehicle, or one seized by force. For the most part the crowd just stumbled hurriedly on, carrying bits of household gear or food or bedding, wheeling perambulators, or handcarts upon which old or injured people sometimes lay. They only wanted, for the most part, in their state of stunned stupor, to get away.

The problem of controlling their movement, daunting though it might be, was in the Soviet fashion fairly easily solved, at least in the first instance. The USSR had raised more than 1,000 KGB battalions in the process of mobilization. It was not difficult to put a barrage round Minsk at a distance of some 12 kilometres from the centre and shoot anyone not belonging to the Party structure or the military who wished to come further.