The Third World War: The Untold Story

The first Soviet occupation troops in Afghanistan had been largely drawn from the nearby Central Asian territories but the strain upon them had been too great when they were ordered to shoot at fellow Central Asians and fellow Moslems. These units were accordingly quite soon withdrawn, to be replaced by others with a higher proportion of non-Central Asian and non-Moslem conscripts. But the continuing lack of success of the Soviets in their attempts to 'pacify' Afghanistan and the continuing casualties which were reported as occurring in their forces (exaggerated no doubt as a result of the suppression of genuine news) led to a significant build-up of nationalist feeling in the Central Asian republics. People were already beginning to remind themselves that the constitution of the Soviet Union provided for the voluntary secession of any of the constituent republics, even though in practice the discussion of this possibility had led to a sticky end for those who had been rash enough to try it on. It should therefore have been no surprise to the Soviet authorities that the check to their advance in Europe, the defection of units fighting there whose men came largely from the Central Asian area, and the marked unwillingness of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan to carry out their warlike operations once the news from Europe turned sour, should precipitate an outbreak of nationalism. This happened first in Uzbekistan, where the populace took to the streets and proclaimed independence, and soon after that in other Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union as well.

Looking now further south it is clear that India will be in no better state after 1985 than before to enter into any far-reaching economic or defensive international system. With population increase still out of control and with sprawling bureaucratic confusion as the nearest approach to government, the struggle to maintain a place in the modern world is going to seem increasingly forlorn. The loss of the Soviet counterpoise to China will upset the Indian external balancing act, and the break-up of a neighbouring empire may stimulate fissiparous tendencies in the Indian federation. If China, or a Sino-Japanese co-prosperity system succeeds, there will be many Indian politicians pressing to follow this example. But the more likely chance must be that India will long remain an inward-looking depressed area, whose future, like that of much of Africa, will depend on the successful restoration of the north-south dialogue, never yet very fruitful and now grievously interrupted by the 1985 war, and the even more pressing agenda of post-war settlement in northern Asia.

All this has left the vast expanse of Siberia to an unplanned future, which is hardly surprising, since the interests of the rest of the world in it were never more than marginal. Its water resources might have to be exploited sooner or later to improve food production in Central Asia, though not on the grandiose lines of the Soviet plans to reverse the flow of great rivers. Siberia's mineral resources and the oil offer a powerful attraction to Japanese economic exploitation, but this might well take place without the necessity of political control.

The Trans-Siberian railway and the string of railway towns along it are a monument to Russia's historical conviction of a manifest destiny to march ever eastwards, as well as southwards, until it reached the sea. When the USSR turned its eyes towards the West, however, the settlements along this fragile line of communication were obliged to seek local solutions for their political future. The Soviets had from time to time tried to bring Siberia within the sphere of their own political and economic system. Khrushchev had proclaimed the importance of the new lands in Kazakhstan for revolutionizing the agriculture of the Soviet Union as a whole and had managed to persuade some millions of ethnic Russians to settle in this inhospitable desert, but the plan had never worked. There had also been a deliberate attempt to offset the growing demographic preponderance of the Central Asians by moving Russian settlers into the towns of Central Asia but this had not succeeded in making much change in the proportions between native Russians in the area and its Moslem inhabitants.

Apart from these spasmodic and unsuccessful efforts to Russianize Asia, there could be no doubt that the general impression uppermost in the minds of most of the inhabitants of European Russia about their dominions in Asia was of their being used both in Tsarist times and again under communism as a penal settlement. After the war geography took its revenge and the traces of Soviet occupation began to disappear, except in the few centres in which former Soviet troops established settlements rather like the earlier Macedonian and Roman settler colonies of retired soldiers.