The Third World War - The Untold Story (65 page)

None of the shops had anything much in stock except the liquor store, where there was vodka, beer, wine and champagne. Crates of bottles were carefully lifted out on to the street, without a bottle broken. The bottles passed from hand to hand along the street, everyone taking a swig in turn. But there was no food. No shop in the street had been left un-plundered, and still there was no food.

“Intourist!” shouted someone.

“Intourist!” The cry spread.

A menacing crowd surged across the bridge towards a great box-like hotel reserved for foreign visitors. This place had long been hated. To proclaim the successes of the communist regime “paradise zones” had been built for foreigners in many parts of the main towns, with splendid hotels, restaurants, shops, hospitals, sports stadia. The Party and the KGB carried out an intensive campaign to win “friends for communism” in these zones. Ordinary citizens were strictly barred from access to them. Amongst the people, especially old folk who could still remember the Tsarist regime, this was a source of great indignation. Why should they not have the right, in their own country, to go into the best restaurants, hotels and shops?

When war had first broken out, the hotels for foreigners in Moscow and the other towns had all been cordoned off by KGB detachments. All the foreigners in them were arrested and many were now being shot in the hotel cellars, with little or no enquiry as to whether they were friends or enemies. After all, there was nothing now to feed them on, and no one to guard them. Lorries had been heard the night before near the Metropole Hotel. They were carrying away the corpses of foreign citizens.

Hungry crowds of Muscovites assumed that the lorries were only making the usual nocturnal deliveries. The mob now came streaming from all parts of the city in search of food.

In the inner courtyard of the Metropole Hotel, prisoners from the Lefortovo prison, guarded by a small squad of mounted militiamen, had just finished loading corpses of foreign guests of the capital of communism into the lorries. At the head of the convoy a militia lieutenant on a horse gave the order to open the gates and started to walk his horse on through them. In front of him, advancing round the corner on to the square, came a solid wall of people armed with sticks, stones and chains. Along the way some had torn up iron railings and the long rods with their pointed ends bristled above the crowd like the pikes of a mediaeval army.

“Close the gates!” shouted the lieutenant. A couple of militiamen jumped to do so. But the crowd had already caught sight of the long grey vans in the courtyard, and a menacing roar filled the square.

“They've got bread there.”

“And meat!”

“Smoked fish!”

“Comrades!” shouted the officer, “there's nothing in the lorries. There's no food there!”

“Then why have you shut the gates?” they shouted back at him. “Give us the bread!”

Half a dozen mounted militiamen came hurrying to the officer's side. Three more quickly set up a machine-gun by the gates.

Just at that moment, a square-built red-haired lad poked the rump of the lieutenant's mount with a long spike. The horse reared up on its hind legs, throwing its rider. There was a howl of triumph, and a hail of stones deluged the militiamen. The crowd pressed forward, pulling off the antique gates and filling the inner courtyard. They broke into the lorries and tore off the tarpaulins.

“Bread!”

Bewilderment, disappointment, despair, hatred and horror filled the courtyard. Instead of bread they had found dead bodies. The thousands of people filling the square outside did not know what had happened in the courtyard but seemed to guess instinctively that something dreadful had been discovered.

To get a better view a few climbed up on to the statue of Karl Marx.

“Break the old bastard up,” came a call from the crowd. People nearby burst out laughing. Some who had managed to get hold of a metal post began bashing at the granite pedestal.

“That's no good. We'll have to pull him down.”

A thick wire cable was produced from somewhere and its end passed up to the people sitting on Marx's head. They wound the cable round his granite neck and threw down the end. It was eagerly seized and the huge grey granite block came tumbling down to the triumphant roar of the crowd.

“Lenin too!”

“And Dzerzhinski!”

The growing crowd had filled the square and now surged on to Red Square. The higher the dam, the louder the roar when it collapses. The more apparently tranquil the million tons of water held in by the dam, the more terrifying and destructive its force when it finally breaks out into freedom.

On the square, by the Historical Museum, the single barrel of a 57 mm anti-aircraft gun thrust upwards to the sky. A few batteries of these guns covered the city centre. The roaring crowd appearing round the corner caught the gun crew completely unawares.

People swarmed over the anti-aircraft gun from all directions. They offered the soldiers opened bottles of wine. Then, suddenly, from the Kremlin walls a machine-gun cracked its leaden whip. People fell injured and dying.

“Brothers, soldiers - defend us!”

The sergeant commanding the gun crew drew his pistol and aimed it into the crowd. Instantly, one of his own soldiers bayoneted him in the back. The crowd ducked under the walls for shelter from the machine-gun fire. The Kremlin guards' fire was answered by a hand-held machine-gun from somewhere in the crowded square. But the Kremlin machine-gun behind the ancient and mighty walls was invulnerable. Then the anti-aircraft gun swung smoothly round. The loader threw a clip of ten shells into the breach, the weapon swallowed and discharged them, and disgorged the empty cartridge cases on to the stone pavement. Ten explosions so close to each other as to be almost simultaneous broke through the ancient wall, into the embrasure in the Spassky Tower through which the machine-gun was firing. The square was shrouded in brick dust and filled with the smell of burning explosive.

“Hurrah-ah-ah!”

“And again!”

“Aim at the stars, the stars!”

“At the gates!”

“At Lenin!”

But the gun crew knew better. The loader threw in another clip and this time the gun swung slowly from left to right, firing off single unhurried shots at the Kremlin walls, breaking the merlons which concealed the automatic weapons of security guards. The high building immediately behind the Kremlin wall was now in its turn being torn apart by exploding shells. Masonry and glass came crashing to the ground. A roar of approval from the crowd accompanied every shot. The gunners would gladly have fired at the doors of the Lenin Mausoleum but there were people there already trying to break their way in with improvised battering rams. Instead, the barrel of the anti-aircraft gun swung smoothly upwards and with a tongue of flame in one single shot shattered to smithereens the red star topping the Spassky Tower.

The Mausoleum guards had fled but the black marble doors of the Mausoleum itself stood fast.

“We'll have to break it open, all the same,” someone shouted in the crowd, “and have him out.”

“No use! Lenin rotted years ago, it's just a wax effigy there now!”

“We'll get in and see!”

“It's not Lenin that's rotted,” someone had to make a speech, “it's Leninism. It rotted when Lenin broke up the Constituent Assembly . . .”

But there was nothing to be done: the Mausoleum had been well built in its time. The crowd cleared out of it on to Red Square where they strung up without ceremony several men who had been identified as members of the Central Committee, indiscriminately mixed with ordinary Kremlin security guards.
Aux lanternes!

It was the members of the Politburo that were now being sought by this rampaging crowd, but they were nowhere to be found. They had escaped by an underground passage into the Metro where an armoured train was waiting to whisk them away.

Not the Kremlin itself but the buildings housing the Communist Party bureaucracy within the Kremlin were ablaze. The Kremlin churches were unharmed. People flocked into them, praying on their knees for the Lord God to forgive the sins of His long-suffering people.

For sixty-eight years Moscow had not heard church bells. Now, high above Moscow, Ivan the Dread, the great bell of all Russia, awoke from his slumber. His mellow chime rang out over the ancient city, where the communists in little more than half a century had destroyed so many more people than even the Tartars in 300 years. Hear what the ancient bell has to say - “forgive our enemies ...” - What? Nobody is doing any forgiving here.
Aux lanternes!

Along the avenues of Moscow, members of the Party, many protesting to the end in vain that they were not really communists, hung like bunches of grapes from the lamp posts. So many of them! It was done quickly - some by the neck to die, some by the legs already dead. Rope ran out. Electric light cable did very well instead. At the Lyubyanka a battle raged. It was a vast building, with 1,000 people inside, all armed with pistols. On the square in front of the memorial to the founder of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky, lay the mutilated corpses of members of what was now the KGB. The building itself had so far remained inviolate. The secret police knew what awaited them and were putting up a spirited defence. Anti-aircraft guns towed along from various parts of the city rained shells into the windows but those within refused to give themselves up.

Then, above the block of the Lyubyanka, a column of smoke rose up to the sky. The heads of the KGB, like the members of the Politburo, had abandoned the building and made their way to safe hiding in the Metro through a secret underground passage. The fate of ordinary officers left to beat back the pressure of the crowd was no concern of theirs. Before leaving they had set fire to the building from within, to destroy the archives. The fire spread with amazing rapidity. There were plenty of documents to feed it. One thousand Chekists now found themselves caught in a rat-trap. Flames raged in the corridors, but the windows on the lower stories were secured by substantial grilles. It was only possible to jump from the second floor, from the burning windows straight down on to the asphalt below. Legs were broken in the fall but this was of minor consequence. The crowd trampled on those who fell, stoned them, beat in their skulls.

“Put out the fire!” came the cry. “Put it out! There are millions of names there of people we want. Save the archives!”

Too late. The floors and roof were well alight. Staircases and ceilings fell in. Well, perhaps the safes would survive. We'll sort it out afterwards and square up accounts somehow.

From the Lyubyanka to the Old Square a huge crowd was now milling. There was something even more interesting going on there. This was the location of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, in several blocks, solidly built and united into one large building complex with hundreds of kilometres of corridors. There were even more people here than at the Lyubyanka, though those buildings were older perhaps, more solidly built, and well armed.

The thousands of inmates of the Central Committee building saw they had no option. They gave themselves up without a fight. A security guard was hurriedly formed from amongst the crowd to preserve what could be saved from the archives. Then, in several places on the square, the officials and security police were lined up and executed in turn after a brief pretence at trial. There were not enough guns, not enough rope, nor even in the event enough electric cable. The executions were carried out when all else failed with firemen's axes, or the officials were simply bludgeoned to death or thrown down from the windows or rooftops. White and shaking men who had only the day before been holding their own country and almost half the world by the throat came creeping out. They were all lined up and made to await their punishment.

There was laughter in the gloating crowd. “Now it’s your turn to queue. You lot have never had to wait in a queue. You can do it now!”

Meanwhile at the Lyubyanka a heavy tractor had fixed a hawser round Iron Felix, the statue of Dzerzhinsky. He soon came crashing down on to the corpses of those who were the successors of his Cheka, startling a flock of ravens, who flew up croaking into a sky darkened by the smoke from burning buildings.

There was swift and cruel vengeance everywhere, bitter retribution and a bloodstained payment of account. But there was still no food. “

One of the main preoccupations of the United States authorities in the very rapid planning which they had undertaken about the future of the Soviet forces and the Soviet empire had been to assume control and possession of the nuclear weapons remaining in Soviet hands. The regrouping of Soviet divisions which occurred at Omsk and Khabarovsk was authorized by the Allied authorities only on the condition that all nuclear weapons in the possession of these forces were handed over to American teams sent in for the purpose. Other small American task forces operated dispersed over Soviet Asia searching for and taking possession of, by force if necessary, the weapons still held by units which had scattered throughout the vast expanse of Siberia. The Americans and Chinese met by prior arrangement at the Soviet missile testing ground, which was not, in fact, at Bykonor in Kazakhstan, as was always publicly put out by Soviet disinformation services, but not very far away at Tyuratam. The decision was taken to set up a group of experts to make a common study of the relevant Soviet technology. They also agreed that nuclear material on the site should be removed for disposal rather than incorporated in the nuclear forces of either party. This agreement symbolized American acceptance of the fact that they could not hope for the de-nuclearization of China. They were certainly in no position to enforce it. Since they did not believe that the present Chinese regime would make use of nuclear weapons in a manner contrary to the interests of the United States or of world peace, they were content to make a virtue of necessity.

The situation was, however, quite different with regard to other possessors or possible possessors of nuclear weapons. The Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 had failed in its object of restricting the possession of nuclear weapons to the five powers possessing them in the 1960s (the USA, Soviet Union, UK, France and China) and there was reasonable evidence to support the view that others had them or had the capability of making them at short notice. The most certain candidates for inclusion in this group were Iraq, Pakistan, India, South Africa, Israel. Libya might have attempted to purchase one with its oil money but could now be happily struck off the list. The others, however, still represented the danger of a possible use of these weapons in the local quarrels which were only too likely to continue after the general war came to an end.