The Third World War: The Untold Story

At a distance of some 30 kilometres (in front of Borisov for example) a further ring of KGB troops was established. It was their business not to shoot down anyone attempting to get through but simply to send them back, with the exception of any individuals who could prove an official connection.

The headquarters of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia had moved out from Minsk on the outbreak of war and was established, together with the headquarters of the Belorussian Military District, in Orsha. These two centres of power, the military and the civil acting jointly, with the military commander technically in charge but the Party First Secretary as his deputy the real source of authority, now faced a truly frightening task of relief and reorganization. It was quite beyond the resources of the republic of Belorussia. It was formidable even for the USSR and could hardly be contemplated without despair.

Only much later would the question arise why such an appalling disaster should ever have been invited and who was to blame. There will probably never be an answer. What is sure is that it should never have happened and must never be allowed to happen again.

Chapter 21: Soviet Disintegration

Minsk was chosen as the target for the Western nuclear attack because of its general comparability with Birmingham as the Soviet target. To destroy Moscow or Leningrad would have been a fast jump up the ladder of escalation. An important provincial city was required, far enough from the capital so that no direct physical effects would be felt there, but near enough for immediate political repercussions on the seat of government. Minsk answered this bill. It was not just a specimen city of the Soviet Union, but the capital of the Belorussian Republic, one of the principal constituent units of the USSR, and singled out for special prominence by being allotted a fictionally independent seat at the United Nations. The stability and coherence of the area was weakened by the frontier changes after the Second World War, when Poland was pushed bodily westwards, absorbing parts of Germany, but losing territory, and population, to Belorussia and the Ukraine. As a result there were important Catholic minorities in both these republics. The destruction of Minsk would clearly add to the internal strains in the whole area.

The Ukraine, lying immediately to the south of Belorussia, is far larger and more important. It occupies an area greater than that of France and has a population of about the same size. Before the war it produced more steel than the Federal Republic of Germany, with major armament works at Kharkov and Kiev. Kiev was the capital of the First Russia, before the Tartar invasion and before the emergence of Moscow. But the Ukraine had never been an independent state. It was a battlefield between Poles and Russians, Turks and even Swedes, before it was finally absorbed by Russia in 1654. However, the memories of former greatness and the idea of Ukrainian independence had never wholly died. They had, indeed, been revived by Stalinist persecution and by the repression of a fragmentary independence movement in 1966.

After Minsk the Ukrainians could well fear that Kiev or Kharkov would be next on the Allied targeting list. There was another more long-standing anxiety: insurrection was now widespread in Poland and receiving active and increasing support from the Western allies. As we have seen, this was already weakening the Soviet military effort in Germany. The destruction of Minsk would make it even more difficult for the Soviet Union to control the situation in Poland. If Poland were to escape from Soviet hegemony, one of its first ambitions would probably be to recover the Polish territory lost to Belorussia and the Ukraine. The Ukraine would be wise not to lose much time in claiming its own independence and looking after its own interests rather than those of its Soviet overlords.

To the north of Belorussia, the brief independence of the three Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, had also been extinguished by the USSR in the Second World War, but they had never been wholly assimilated and were now likely to be early candidates for freedom. Minsk therefore proved politically more significant in death than it had ever been in life. Its destruction triggered the dissolution of the whole western border area of the Soviet Union, not only by showing the vulnerability of Soviet power but by releasing, through the psychological Shockwaves of four nuclear missiles, the nationalistic passions which had lain dormant for so long.