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
On the morning of the fateful meeting, Duglenko’s boss, the KGB Chief, met with a fatal ‘motor accident’ on his way into Moscow. Duglenko, already in the Kremlin, could now be satisfied that he would have access to the Politburo session. He relied on two things: complete surprise, for which reason no one knew of the details of his plan except the dozen secret policemen required to carry it out, mostly fellow Ukrainians; and the willingness of the Soviet administrative machine of that time to accept orders from the top, whatever they might be — a characteristic which he in fact was determined to change but which on this occasion was to serve him well. When the meeting had assembled and he was summoned to report on the accident to his Chief he drew from his pocket not a sheaf of paper, but a pistol, with which he shot dead President Vorotnikov, and on this signal his fellow conspirators, already on guard outside the room, broke in and disarmed the rest of the Politburo. Duglenko announced that he was assuming the offices of President and Party Secretary; he ordered the removal, under guard, of the leading hard-line members, and received the allegiance of the rest, who had little choice, with guns still drawn all round them.
The next few hours were a feverish race against time, to assume effective command of the armed forces before any counter-move could be made and before any wild orders could be given for nuclear release, to reassure the population, and not least to reassure the Americans and dissuade them from any idea of a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Some of the Soviet commanders were, as has been said, generally favourable to the idea of salvaging what they could from the present unhappy situation, as the only means of keeping the armed forces in being, but very few of them were privy to the details of the conspiracy. It had, of course, been necessary in advance to place one of these few in the post which handled the transmissions of presidential orders to the strategic nuclear forces, so that when Duglenko, having done what was immediately necessary in Moscow, finally got on the hot-line to President Thompson, he was able to assure him confidently that the Soviet nuclear forces had been ordered to stand down, and to ask President Thompson kindly to give corresponding orders on his side. Duglenko proposed in addition a complete ceasefire within twelve hours, and the opening of an early conference in Helsinki to draw up terms of peace.
Even the most expert Kremlin-watchers on the Western side were taken by surprise. In the confusion of the next few hours, while the American answer was being prepared, some voices were heard urging that it was a trick, or that if there were a real upset in Moscow, now was the time to push ahead and finish the Russians off. More accurately, some others argued that this was no more than a change of Russian tactics; the new, more open and more decentralized communism, of which they were getting the first news by monitoring Moscow broadcasts, would in the long run be more dangerous to the West than the brutal obscurantism of its predecessor. Therefore no concessions should be made, the guard should be kept up, and so on. But it was eventually agreed to be thankful for a large if not necessarily permanent mercy, to reciprocate the downgrading of nuclear alert, to accept the ceasefire, and to prepare, with all due caution, for a conference.
Duglenko had to contend with far more arduous decision-making, on no less a subject than the future of the Soviet Union. At a hastily-summoned meeting of representatives of all the constituent republics there was not really much choice but to accept that the Union was in dissolution; independence was now openly proclaimed as the objective of the Ukraine. It had already been achieved by many of the republics in Asia. The Russians now clearly had to accept that whether they liked it or not they were on their own.
It was generally agreed that they would all form a joint delegation to the Helsinki Conference, and at the same time work out the modalities of separation. Needless to say, the violent transition from a centralized autocracy to multiple nationhood was not everywhere achieved in an orderly manner. Not all the republics were geared to establish their own administrations, and many had deficient economic resources. The enormous problem of disposing of the former Soviet forces, in Europe and Africa and the Middle East, was being handled by UNRRO.
The Conference, as is the way of conferences, proliferated into a whole series, some of which are still continuing, and it would require another volume of this history to do justice to all these deliberations. The collapse of the USSR meant the end of large-scale hostilities in Europe. It did not mean universal peace.
CHAPTER 27: Reflections on a War
Conflicts which the Soviet Union did not start, but which it studiously sought to sharpen and exploit, have yet to be resolved. Fighting still goes on. The pattern of the successor states into which the USSR seems now to be dividing has yet to be fully determined. There are differences between the countries which, under their former regime, were all members of the Warsaw Pact. There are also differences between each one of them and the member states of the Western Alliance, with which they have so lately been at war. To settle all these differences will take time and will be far from easy. Meanwhile, there is still warfare outside Europe. No doubt it will continue, in one way or another, for some time, with whatever resources (and much material has been left behind by the Russians) the belligerents can find.
The Third World War, however, can be fairly said to have ended with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in late August 1985 and the cessation of direct hostilities between the major powers. We have already taken a brief glance at how the world then looked, and in the concluding chapter we look a little into the future. Something more should now be said about what might have happened and did not, about certain contributory factors to the outcome and about some, at least, of the conclusions that can be drawn from these events.
What especially distinguishes the scene we now see about us — and this is something to which we shall only be able to grow accustomed with the passage of time — is the absence from it of the powerful, restless, baleful, expansive, intractably dogmatic imperialism of Soviet Russia.
The world has come out of another bad dream, just as it did out of the Nazi nightmare. This one lasted rather longer. The myth born in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 persisted, before it was dispersed, for nearly three- quarters of a century. It was the myth of the emergence of true democracy from a proletarian explosion, when what had really taken place was the murderous overthrow of a democratically elected government by a fanatical authoritarian minority.
It is argued by some that the basic contradictions of Marxism-Leninism would inevitably have caused, in time, the downfall of any state built on it. Whatever Karl Marx may have contributed to nineteenth-century thought his political philosophy is held by many today, a century later, to be unscientific, romantic and obsolete, no more useful as a guide to government in the twentieth century than the novels of Charles Dickens as a reflection of life today in England. Indeed, if the revolutionary genius of Lenin had not harnessed to the advancement of Marxism a huge and backward group of peoples accustomed to absolutism — most of them Asiatic and some still semi-savage — it might have been consigned to the dust heap of history long ago, and this particular nightmare might never have occurred at all. The nightmare is now over, and we shall never know if the USSR, given time, would have fallen apart by itself or not, without the war it brought about. There may be other nightmares still ahead.
It has been suggested with some plausibility that in addition to the conjunction of miscalculation and mischance which triggered off the explosion of August 1985 there had long been a growing awareness among the rulers of the USSR of increasing strains within the Warsaw Pact, and within the Soviet Union itself, which could hardly be contained without a signal military victory over the capitalist West. There had also been, among the top people in the regime, a very real fear of Germany. There had even been some fear of the capacity of the Federal Republic to lead the West (and above all the United States) into an aggressive war against the communist East. This was a fear which West German insistence on ‘forward defence’ (whatever that might mean — and it clearly meant different things to different people) did little to abate. It was for all that little but the product of the Soviet Union’s own propaganda.
The real causes of this war between the Eastern and the Western blocs will long be matter for debate. Whatever they were the fighting could not, it now seems, find its resolution (if it did not move into the strategic exchange of weapons of mass destruction, which would have emptied the concept of ‘resolution’ of all meaning)
