The really crushing blow came from an unexpected quarter, however. Soviet policy had always been at pains either to suppress or to appease any symptoms of independence of mind on the part of the Ukraine. Its enormous contribution to Soviet food supplies, its position in the front line of Soviet territory facing the West, bordering on Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, and its vast hydro-electric potential, had made it, after Russia proper, the most vital component of the Union. It had suffered more than any other republic from the actions of the Soviet state to obtain food supplies by force after the Revolution and from the subsequent persecution of the wealthier peasants. It had been rewarded after the devastation of the Second World War by being given, with Byelorussia to the north, a privileged but fictitious autonomy as a separate member of the United Nations.
Ukrainian nationalist sentiment had been repressed in 1966 in the Kiev trials of intellectuals and members of the Ukrainian Workers and Peasants Union. Their main crime had been to promote the idea of secession from the Soviet Union, a right enshrined in the Soviet Constitution. Repression had only diverted this sentiment into more powerful channels underground. Its modern exponents understood the axiom that successful revolutions begin at the top. They determined to make use of the one important freedom left to the inhabitants of the Ukraine — the access of individual Ukrainians to positions of power in the central apparatus of the Soviet Union. There had been several successful generals; now the favourite son of the Ukrainian nationalists was in the unlikely guise of a secret policeman.
After graduating from the police academy at Kiev in 1960, Vasyl Duglenko had been recommended to Khrushchev by some of the latter’s Ukrainian cronies, and transferred to the KGB headquarters in Moscow. Being still in a junior post he had managed to survive Khrushchev’s fall, and climbed up the precarious ladder of power to be Deputy Commandant, with special responsibility for the security of the Kremlin. He had retained close links with the nationalist cells in the Communist Party of the Ukraine and he had naturally placed a good number of fellow Ukrainians in suitable positions in the KGB, particularly in the Kremlin section.
So a powerful mechanism was in place, and the Minsk explosions provided the opportunity, and the necessity, for its use. Duglenko and his friends in the Ukrainian Party machine had no wish to take part in the last act of a Russian Gotterdammerung. Although they vaguely knew what was about to happen in Poland they saw no sure future in a separatist movement confined to the Ukraine. The central keep of the Soviet system had to be attacked.
At the centre they could join forces with the group of ‘doves’ already referred to in Chapter 24, whose influence had spread, with the worsening news from East and West, even among sections of the command of the armed forces. It would be vital to have some friends there if a coup was to survive its first dangerous hours.
This army group, small at first and of necessity conspiratorial, had decided even before the attack on Birmingham that nuclear war was not going to achieve Soviet objectives in the West, nor restore order in the East. Moreover, in the ensuing destruction of organized life in the Soviet Union the armed forces themselves were likely to disintegrate. A deliberate return of army units to the Russian heartlands offered better hope for a future system of orderly government in which the armed forces would have an effective role, and its commanders a tolerably secure life. Their ideas probably did not include so radical a break-up of the Soviet Union as the Ukrainians secretly envisaged. They would have been in closer agreement on the need to relax the dead hand of centralized control on the economic life of the country, not in the interests of laissez-faire, but in order to restore efficiency and come nearer to matching the agricultural and industrial productivity of the West, not to speak of China-Japan.
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 status quo.
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.