The Third World War: The Untold Story

The other Warsaw Pact states were even more open than the USSR to outside influences, especially in view of the inability of COMECON to satisfy their consumer needs and resultant closer contacts with, as well as indebtedness to, Western economies. In the event, therefore, that the USSR should seek a direct military confrontation with the USA it would clearly be unwise to defer this beyond, say, 1985. In the more likely contingency of consideration in the Soviet Union of how far it could proceed with high-risk policies, in which the danger of a military confrontation would be considerable, it would clearly be more prudent to pursue such policies in the early 1980s than later on. The window of opportunity would not remain indefinitely open.

The Soviets in their international relations after the Second World War and before the collapse of Soviet imperialism in the Third, though they were thought by so many to be masters of a shrewd and far-sighted strategy, often demonstrated a quite surprising degree of maladroitness. This was often so striking as to arouse comment at the time. Their extraordinary mismanagement of affairs in Austria in 1946 was a very early example, when their conviction that Austrian gratitude for liberation by the Red Army made it safe to allow free elections, in the confidence that a communist majority would be returned, resulted in the election of an Assembly without a single communist member. There was also their mishandling of affairs in Yugoslavia, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in the Middle East, in the Indian sub-continent and with China, and their dramatic expulsion, lock stock and barrel, in 1972 from what looked like a deeply entrenched position in Egypt. Rarely, however, has the history of international relations shown a more outstanding example of maladroitness than the bringing about of the NATO Alliance and West German rearmament. The Reich lay prostrate before its four principal enemies — the USA, Britain, the Soviet Union and France — totally defeated. Within four years of that time, Soviet policy had so antagonized its former allies that, with their patience exhausted, the other three saw no alternative but to form a defensive alliance and then bring in the defeated enemy re-armed. Pro-Soviet fantasists in the West sought in vain to disguise the simple truth. NATO, a purely defensive structure, was brought into being by the USSR and by the USSR alone. The Soviet Union was itself the only begetter of what was to become its greatest bane.

Citizens of the Soviet Union, as the 1970s moved on into the 1980s, may well by now have come to accept their lot with resignation, without any confidence, or even any hope, that it would ever change for the better. It would be wrong to suppose, as many did in the West, that they were also wholly lacking in awareness of what went on in the other world, outside the closed system which constituted their own. In addition to what came in through radio broadcasts from outside, the circulation of information within the Soviet Union itself was a good deal freer than was commonly realized in the West. It was certainly much freer than the Communist Party liked. A country in which a huge black market flourishes, however, is not one in which information does not circulate, especially when the black market is not only permitted by the authorities but even, as compensation for their own extraordinary ineptitude, actively encouraged, though the circulation of information, of course, is not. Though the concept of public opinion as a political force in a communist state is hardly valid, it was inevitable that in the Soviet Union, in the four or five years before the war, there was not only widespread awareness of what was going on in the outside world but strong currents of political opinion flowing from it. The boycott of the Olympic games made a far greater impression than was commonly realized abroad and the attempts by the Party to play down its effects and claim an outstanding public relations success produced in Moscow a veritable flood of the sick jokes whose volume and venom had long been the only reliable index of public reaction to events. The invasion of Afghanistan aroused wide interest and deep unpopularity and, as it dragged on with no satisfactory end even remotely in sight, it was more clearly recognized as a blunder of the first magnitude. The disposal of the dead in the Afghan campaign threw a particularly interesting light on popular attitudes. At first they were flown home for burial, but as the flow continued and the numbers grew this was seen to be unwise. Public concern in the Asiatic republics, from which most of the first troops engaged in Afghanistan came, was so marked (particularly in Kazakhstan) that from mid-1981 the practice ceased. The dead were now buried in the country where they died.