It was a persuasive picture, but reports from Eastern Europe and from the constituent republics of the Soviet Union, which were growing in volume, were already lending support to a contrary thesis put forward by the doves. The Poles as usual led the way. With the outbreak of war the Soviet Union had re-imposed its own control in Poland, working through the Polish ministries and the apparatus of the police. This only served to stimulate resistance, which is a natural habit of mind in a people who have been oppressed for 200 years by larger neighbours.
Meanwhile, the Western Allies were hastily continuing their by no means fruitless efforts to reactivate the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and SOE (Special Operations Executive) and improve liaison with resistance groups. In the confusion of the turning-point battle in Germany a Polish armoured unit in the north deliberately let itself be overrun by the advancing Americans, which provided a breakthrough for Western intelligence and an invaluable nucleus for a further liaison network. The West for some time tried to play the old themes of 1939-45, but in fact the grounds for revolt this time were rather different. The basic aims in Poland and elsewhere were to get the Soviet Union off their backs, to get enough to eat, and to find their own way to whatever political future they might choose. This did not necessarily imply rejection of a communist future, but only, and most decidedly, of the Soviet way of achieving it. For a society aiming at middle-class consumer values the dictatorship of the proletariat was in any case rather an out-of-date concept. But what was really intolerable was the dictatorship of the Soviet proletariat, as represented by the Soviet Politburo and the KGB.
As the more acute observers in the West had foreseen, the phenomenon of Euro-communism was proving far more lethal to the Soviet empire than to Western capitalism. The oppressed nationalities of Eastern Europe, and in the Soviet Union itself, were not blind to the defects of Western society in general. They did not all aspire to have their economies run by US multi-national companies any more than by Soviet planners. The idea which inspired them was that of a society based at one and the same time both on national freedom and on socialist principle. Once the Soviet offensive in Europe stalled an opportunity began to open up for asserting this approach. There was not much combination between the various national movements, but the fact that so many of them both in Europe and in Asia felt the same urge to national independence, and started moving at the same time, turned a few local outbreaks into what was to become an irresistible revolt.
Disaffection achieved a cumulative momentum of its own. In addition to the growing resistance in Eastern Europe, the stirrings of nationalist revolt in Central Asia fomented by the Chinese made it unsafe for the Soviet General Staff to rely on units which contained a high proportion of soldiers from those areas. A larger number of reliable units had to be sent eastwards from military districts which could be properly called Russian. This left fewer troops for internal security in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. There they had to watch not only the civilian population but the local army units as well, the loyalty of whose rank and file to the Soviet command became every day more doubtful. The resistance was not, as in the Second World War, that of an underground movement against the authorities; the authorities themselves began to resist the pressures and directives of the Soviet civil and military hierarchies. This showed itself principally in the failure to maintain communications through Poland between the Soviet Union and East Germany. Railways and roads were sabotaged, thus gravely hampering forward movement of second and third echelon formations and of munitions, as well as the delivery of food and manufactures from Poland to the USSR. The Polish authorities proved singularly unable to find those responsible. Attempts by Soviet forces to do so directly not only tied up still more units which could have been better used elsewhere, but led to the first incidents of urban guerrilla fighting directed against the billets and movements of Soviet garrisons.
Russia had been successful in previous conflicts, against Napoleon and against Hitler, because of three priceless assets: unlimited space, apparently unlimited manpower and the willingness of Russians to be led into frightful sacrifice for the defence of the motherland. Now, everything was reversed. It was no good retreating into the vast interior space of Eurasia when this would merely consolidate the ring of states, not all friendly, which was forming out of the fragments of an empire. And manpower was no longer wholly reliable. The men who came from subject territories were less willing to be sacrificed in order to maintain alien rule on neighbouring countries. Soviet manpower was at the same time intolerably overstretched by national revolt against the Soviet Union on two fronts as well as by resistance to the gathering Western forces in Germany and by the requirement to face a potential Chinese threat.
The threat in the east was not seen primarily in military terms. The Soviet superiority in equipment and experience still seemed enough to compensate for greater Chinese numbers. Nuclear preponderance still lay with the USSR, though how long this would continue into the future was doubtful. The threat was once again not to Soviet Russia’s military strength, but to her political weakness. The peoples who now formed the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union had been conquered or absorbed in the nineteenth century in a great surge of colonialist expansion to the east and south. Russia had been drawn forward in an age of competitive imperialism by rivalry with Britain, pushing north and west from India, and the opportunity to take advantage of the weakness of China. The Russians had been in some ways more successful and more ruthless than the British. The north-west frontier of India remained a battle-ground for the British and British-Indian armies up to the end of British rule in India in the mid-twentieth century. Russia had liquidated similar tribal opposition in Georgia and the Caucasus before the end of the nineteenth. Even more remarkably, Russian control over enormous areas of Asia and many millions of non-Russian subjects survived not only the transition from Tsarism to Bolshevism, but also the break-up of Western empires in Asia, which might have been expected to set a dangerous example to the republics of the Soviet Union in Central Asia.
Now, however, there was a new factor. It was the growing strength and prosperity of China. Up to the 1970s China had not proved an attractive force. The Chinese had suppressed the Moslems in Sinkiang no less brutally than the Russians in Tashkent and Alma Ata. The material rewards of Chinese communism had been even less satisfying than membership of the Soviet Union. Now, however, co-prosperity was changing the material balance, and the Chinese were using the minorities on their side of the border to infiltrate and influence those on the other. Apart from offers of greater economic well-being, there were arguments closer to the heart of Soviet doctrine which could be turned against their authors. It had long been an essential element of Soviet policy and propaganda that ‘peaceful co-existence’ included the support of movements, even wars, of national liberation. These had up till now been far away, in Africa or South-east Asia; but why, it was now asked, should not the same principle apply to the nations of the Uzbeks and Kazakhs? Had not the Soviet constitution provided for the secession of the constituent republics if these should ever wish it? Had not the moment come, at this time in an unsuccessful war, when such aspirations might begin to be realized?
For the time being the Communist Party apparatus and the secret police were strong enough to keep such movements in check. But their existence was enough to add powerfully to the worries of the central authorities, and to sharpen the arguments between those who thought the crisis should be heightened as a means of restoring order and obedience, and those who wanted to draw back from the over-extension which had already led Soviet Russia into so many troubles.