Are not we of the West somewhat blindly assuming that the next war is going to be like the last — a war of unconditional surrender enforced by the threat of annihilation?
It would seem that we are, for we are pouring out our pounds, dollars, francs and florins on the production of lethal things as if we were a golden Niagara. We seek in force alone the solution of the Russian problem. We have placed guns before the whole cow and the roar of our engines reverberates round the world. We are its modern Titans, for soon in one brief battle the Americans alone will be able to unleash the destructive energy of the whole of the last war. Nevertheless, let us not forget that, in spite of their might, our classical prototypes ultimately landed themselves in Tartarus.
In assuming that the next war, now in process of gestation, will primarily be a physical struggle, and that, therefore, physical force will be the “Open Sesame” of victory, are not we taking too much for granted? Out of our frantic volcanic lives cannot we set aside a bare half-hour in which to ask ourselves the first of all military questions — “What is the problem?”
Apparently not, for we gaze into the Russian shop-window, in which everything is decorated with the tinsel of propaganda, and for some inexplicable reason we shy off from boldly walking into the shop itself. Yet it is the things within it which will tell us what the problem is, and should we spare a little thought, will suggest to us its answer.
Among other things in the window is displayed a map of the Bolshevik Ideological Empire. It is greater than Genghis Khan’s for it covers a quarter of the land surface of the globe, stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the Himalayas and the China Seas and from the river Elbe to the Pacific. It includes about a third of the inhabitants of the world. It also is titanic.
But were we to go into the shop itself, we would find that everything displayed in the window is a fake or a lie, for in 1917, Lenin introduced a new philosophy. He took the basic maxim of Western civilization — “The truth shall make you free” — and inverted it. Thus in the Bolshevik vocabulary every word is perverted: a lie is called the truth, and truth is denounced as a lie, police terror is called democracy, serfdom is called freedom, conquest is called liberation, subjection is called self-determination, and the Political Bureau of the Bolshevik Party is called the proletariat, in the interest of which all individual freedom and natural rights are suppressed.
Why has this policy of confounding the meaning of words been adopted? The answer is, that the nations “may not understand one another’s speech”. It is the story of the Tower of Babel bolshevized.
The very name the Russian Empire now bears — namely, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — is a lie; for the U.S.S.R. is not a union of republics as it is proclaimed to be; instead it is the compulsory serfdom of nearly two hundred subjugated peoples, speaking different languages and stemming from different cultures, each one trampled upon and held in leash by terror. Yet in this there is nothing new, for as the Pan-Slavism of Tzarist Russia was but a catchword for Russian Imperialism, so to-day Communism is but the catchword for Bolshevik Imperialism — the most ruthless the world has ever known.
Therefore Communism is also a lie; it is But Marxian grease paint superimposed on a fundamentally unchanged historic Russian physiognomy. Though it is true that, in 1917, Lenin attempted to impose Marxist Communism on Russia, by 1921 it had produced such confusion that to save himself he introduced his New Economic Policy. It was out of his failure and not out of his success that, under Stalin, there emerged a mixture of state capitalism and Asiatic despotism which, depending as it did on slave labour, was so inefficient that it could not compete with the so-called “Capitalist” world — that is, with free enterprise. Therefore, in order that Bolshevism may survive, free enterprise must be destroyed. To-day Marxist Communism is solely for export, because it is the solvent of free enterprise, and its precipitate is chaos, the prerequisite for the establishment of a pistol-ruled (Bolshevik) world.
Except in the concentration camps, there are now no Communists in the U.S.S.R. Of its 193,000,000 inhabitants, some five per cent are state bureaucrats — a highly privileged class — and the remaining ninety-five per cent are state serfs who, unless free enterprise throughout the world is destroyed, may one day wake up to the fact that they are living under a lie, and in consequence liquidate their oppressors.
The crucial fact is, that the Soviet Union cannot indefinitely continue to exist side by side with a system of vastly greater productivity, and how unproductive that union is may be seen in its low participation in world trade even before the upheaval of the last war. Though in 1938 the foreign trade of Finland and the Baltic States, with a combined population of under ten millions, amounted to 586 million dollars, with its then 170,000,000 inhabitants, the foreign trade of the Soviet Union was 74 million dollars less. Another pointer is to be found in the Berlin blockade. Why did the Kremlin impose it? The main reason was, in order to prevent the Eastern Germans seeing that Western Berlin was more prosperous than their own territory. It is its lies which so constantly dictate Soviet policy, and in consequence render it difficult for Western peoples of a totally different morality to understand it.
The contents of the shop reveal that there is no unity within the U.S.S.R. Instead, there is discord both latent and active. Like the Turkish Empire of the nineteenth century, the U.S.S.R. is a mosaic of subjugated peoples. According to the 1939 Russian census, out of a total population of 170,467,186, fifty-eight per cent was Russian and forty-two per cent non-Russian. Also, as in the old Turkish Empire, the Kremlin is attempting to solve its problem of national assimilation by genocide — that is, by massacring and deporting the indigenous peoples of the subjugated countries as well as gradually diluting them with those of Russian stock. The consequence is that, though discontent is normally inarticulate, it is nevertheless universal.
All refugees tell the same story: that the U.S.S.R. is seething with unrest and that behind the Iron Curtain everything is in ferment. Even were they not to do so, their constant influx would prove it, for between August 1945 and August 1950, no less than 15,000 Russian officers and men deserted to Western Germany, and monthly twenty to twenty-five thousand Eastern Germans and others cross the Western German border. Another proof is the steady increase in the number of Soviet prisons. Not long ago, one of the refugees, a former director of Soviet prisons, stated that, whereas in 1930 there were 3,450 prisons in the Soviet Union, in 1950 the number had risen to 11,760, and that between ten and fifteen million people annually pass through them.
Nor is the Russian army unaffected. Since 1939, not only has its structure been shaken by contact with the West, but many of its soldiers have become disillusioned. A typical case is that of Lieutenant Bystrov, who, in December, 1950, deserted. Though before his desertion his impressions of Western standards were based on nothing better than prevailing conditions in Eastern Germany, they “produced on him”, we read, “an enormous psychological shock,” which was followed by a second when on his return on leave to his home in the Urals — a subjugated area — he compared what he had seen in Germany with the utter poverty and misery in which his relatives lived. Further, it should not be overlooked that forty-two per cent of Soviet army recruits come from the subjugated peoples, and, therefore, inherit their discontents.
Though the Soviet army is immensely powerful, it is no coincidence that, whenever the Kremlin has been faced resolutely, it has drawn in its horns. There are two reasons for this. The first is that its inmates have realized that, under present-day conditions, military occupation decides nothing; that, in fact, physical conquest is no longer a profitable aim — a question to which I will return later on. The second is, that they fear actual war like the plague. Not because the U.S.S.R. can easily be subdued by external force, but because war leads to internal disruption. This is a point of vital importance.
In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, it was not Japanese naval and military power which compelled Russia to accept the Peace of Portsmouth; it was the eruption of the revolutionary forces within her. Again, in World War I, it was not her defeat in the field which brought her to sign the ignominious treaty of Brest-Litovsk, it was the astuteness of Lenin who, cashing-in on the ruthless treatment of the subjugated peoples by the Tzarist regime, offered them liberation, fully intending, however, to re-subjugate them once he had created a Bolshevik army. The result was that Tzarist Russia disintegrated, sixteen subjugated nations declaring themselves free and independent national states.
In World War II, as verified by captured German archives, no sooner did the German armies enter the Baltic States, Byelorussia (White Russia) and Ukraine than they were acclaimed as liberators, and vast numbers of Russian soldiers deserted to them. At the time, so encouraging was the German reception that Count Schulenberg, former German Ambassador in Moscow, proposed that the invasion should be turned into a civil war in which the Russians themselves would help in overthrowing the Bolsheviks. He suggested that Germany should announce that she had no territorial claims, that she would agree to each conquered territory setting up its own local government, and that she would recognize these governments as her allies.
But Hitler’s suicidal policy of “der vollkommenen Vernichtung des ukrainischen und der anderen osteuropaischen Volker” (“the complete extermination of the Ukrainian and the other East European peoples”) prevailed. Instead of liberation, the destruction of the Ukrainian and other underground movements was ordered, with the result that for self-preservation the subjugated peoples, both in their countries and in the ranks of the Russian armies, turned against the Germans.
This was the beginning of the collapse of the Third Reich, which was hastened by Stalin’s astuteness in adopting non-Bolshevik tactics, though, like Lenin, his intention was to discard them once the war was won. Had Hitler but offered the subjugated peoples freedom and self-determination, the high probability is that the U.S.S.R. would have collapsed before the end of 1941.
Besides not being able in war-time to rely on the loyalty of its subjugated peoples, the Kremlin is fearful of invading Western countries, because should it do so its soldiers will discover that the U.S.S.R., instead of being, as they have been brought up to believe, the most advanced country in the world, it is one of the most backward, and that they are the victims of a gigantic lie. For this reason alone — though there are others — Stalin has been compelled to substitute what is called “cold” war for “hot”. Its aims are: (1) To confuse the thought of Russia’s adversaries by turning every argument upside down, and reap a propaganda value out of the confusion. (2) To rot her opponents internally, by means of fifth columns, and discount their democratic principles should they resort to repressive measures. (3) To compel them by constant military threat to expend such large sums on armaments that they will cripple their finances and undermine their economies. (4) To distract their military forces by drawing them into distant regions, such as Malaya, Indo-China and Korea, in which only Satellite troops are engaged.
For the Kremlin, cold war is the only type of aggressive warfare which fits Russian psychology. Its strategy is that of dissolution and not of destruction: the attack on the mind of the enemy in order to gain control over his body and not on his body in order to influence his mind. It is not, as with the Western Powers when they talk of psychological or political war, an auxiliary of actual war, but instead it is the real war — the decisive conflict.
In its outlook upon war, the Kremlin is far more up to date than its antagonists. It realizes, as Engels did over eighty years ago, that in modern industrial and scientific conditions, physical warfare is increasingly becoming mutually too destructive to be a profitable instrument of policy. As the last two world wars have clearly shown, the victor comes off almost as badly as the vanquished and this, politically, does not make sense.
We simply cannot ignore the fact that to-day cold war is increasingly ousting hot war as an instrument of policy — it is the new diplomacy — and that unless we learn how to wage it in all its forms, political, ideological, economic and military, so that in wartime we win over the allegiance of the enemy’s masses instead of destroying them, the very means of destruction we employ will end in defeating us.
Now that we have inspected the contents of the Bolshevik shop, the answer to the question “What is the problem?” becomes clear. It is to frustrate the Kremlin’s two-front strategy by adopting a two-front strategy of our own.
- To be strong enough physically either to prevent the outbreak of war, or should war come, to be in a position to contain Russian military operations, and
- under cover of our physical forces, to be astute enough to wage a war of disintegration within the U.S.S.R. and its Satellite countries, not only after the outbreak of war, but from this very moment. Should its aim, successful counterrevolution within the U.S.S.R., be attained without actual war, so much the better; but, war or no war, it will remain unattainable, unless the war of disintegration is ultraoffensive.
Our existing solution of the problem — if solution it can be called — is ultra defensive because it is based on the conception of containing Communism; (1) by military action on fire brigade lines wherever an aggression may take place; (2) by economic betterment in the Western countries in order to prevent Communism from spreading; and (3) by building-up what is called the Atlantic Alliance as the progenitor of a defensive Atlantic or European Army.
Because military action on fire brigade lines is a purely defensive policy, it leaves the initiative in the hands of the Kremlin. Worse still, it does not face up to realities. What is the use of a fire brigade system as long as the fire-raiser is left at large? Further, this dispersion of force emasculates the Atlantic Alliance which is equally unrealistic, for it is based on regional planning, involving over fifty committees, and includes France and Italy, countries with large Communist elements. As regards economic betterment in the West, this is excellent so far as it goes, yet it is frequently overlooked that economic betterment in itself can no more remove an ideology than filling an empty stomach can cure a deranged brain.
This confusion of defensive measures has strengthened the political position of the knock-out school who say that the simplest way out of the tangle is to cut the Gordian Knot, in other words, to rely on physical force alone. After all, have not we got the atomic bomb, and should the worst come to the worst, cannot we blow Russia to hell?
This, however, is a somewhat crude solution, for instead of curing the patient (the world crisis) it knocks him on the head.
Though a sufficiency of force is the first half of the solution, the amount needed will depend as much on the moral state of the Russian people as on the strength of the Russian army. The lower the first is, the weaker will the second be, and the weaker it is, the less will be the physical force required to vanquish it.
The second half of the solution centers in the unbearable Bolshevik rule, which has established a ready-made second front in every country behind the Iron Curtain. Wherever Bolshevism is sown anti-Bolshevism can be reaped, for though by terror a people can be compelled to obey their masters, they cannot be compelled to cease hating them.
Hatred is the Uranium 235 of second half, and without it its physical prototype remains purely a weapon of material destruction. And of all explosives, psychological fission is the one the Kremlin dreads most, because it blows the bottom out of its ideology. Therefore to turn the U.S.S.R. into a gigantic psychological bomb is the second half of the solution.
Thus far, this half has been almost entirely neglected by the Western Powers, yet it is by far the easier to arrive at, because the U.S.S.R., being ethnographically divided into Russians and non-Russians is, in consequence, packed with psychological Uranium.
In 1943, the representatives of the Resistance Movements, then springing up among the conquered and subjugated peoples, banded themselves together into an Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations — the A.B.N. To-day it includes the following twenty-five countries — fourteen in the U.S.S.R. and eleven in Europe:
In the U.S.S.R.: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Byelorussia, Cossackia, Estonia, Georgia, Idel-Ural (between the Volga and the Urals), Latvia, Lithuania, North Caucasia, Siberia (east and west), Turkestan and Ukraine.
In Europe: Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Rumania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia.
The aim of the A.B.N. is the complete dissolution of the Soviet Empire into its ethnographical parts and the establishment of each part as a sovereign nation. The A.B.N. is, therefore, opposed to any form of Russian Imperialism, whether Tsarist, Socialist, Democratic, Republican or Bolshevik. Nor will it tolerate any form of Russian federation, because it fears that whatever form it may take, it will inevitably lead to the re-establishment of a Russian hegemony.
Because in the Atlantic Pact — however defective it may be — is to be found the only potential first front against the Soviet Union, so in the A.B.N. — however lacking in organization it still is — is to be found the only potential second front. Together the two should constitute the grand strategical instrument of the Western Powers, the one being as essential as the other, for neither without the other can achieve what should be the Western aim, not the containment of Communism; but the complete elimination of Bolshevism, without which there can be no peace in the world.
From the value of the A.B.N. as a disruptive instrument, I will next turn to its ability economically and strategically to strangle the U.S.S.R. in another war.
Ukraine, with a population stated to be 42,000,000, is the economic hub of the Soviet Union. This is why Hitler’s aim was to wrench it from Russia. It supplies over fifty per cent of the whole of Russian production, and there is no possibility of destroying the Bolshevik Empire without severing Ukraine from it. Still to-day a Ukrainian insurgent army, known as the U.P.A., is engaged in guerrilla war against the Kremlin.
The following percentages show the importance of Ukraine and other subjugated countries to the over-all Soviet economy: coal sixty per cent from Ukraine and nine per cent from Turkestan; iron ore, sixty per cent from Ukraine, and thirty per cent from Idel-Ural; manganese, one hundred per cent from Georgia and Ukraine; copper, forty per cent from Turkestan and Caucasia; lead, eighty per cent from Turkestan; zinc, eighty per cent from Caucasia and Ukraine; mercury, one hundred per cent from Turkestan and Ukraine; and sulphur, eighty per cent from Ukraine, Caucasia and Turkestan.
Almost the entire production of oil in the U.S.S.R. comes from non-Russian soil: Baku in Azerbaijan, Grosny and Maikop in N. Caucasia, on the Emba in Turkestan, in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Idel-Ural and in Ukraine. Finally, as regards agricultural products, thirty-three per cent of Russian wheat comes from Ukraine and N. Caucasia, seventy per cent of sugar is produced in Ukraine, and one hundred per cent of cotton is grown in Turkestan and Caucasia.
Therefore the conclusion is, should in wartime organized guerrilla war be fostered in the subjugated countries and adequately supplied by the Western Powers, the high probability is that the whole economy of the U.S.S.R. would collapse.
Historically Russia’s strength has been based on two factors, the vast expanse of her territory and her vast man power, and this held good as long as weapon power remained simple and movements were governed by horse traction. But this is no longer the case, for weapon power has been industrialized and air power has reduced her expanse.
Communications in Russia have always been indifferent because expanse and movement are incompatible. Even today, after more than a century of railroad construction, there are no more than 58,000 miles of railroads in the U.S.S.R., whereas in the United States there are 227,000. Further, many of the Russian railroads are still single track, and because those linking the Pacific to the frontiers of Poland and Rumania pass through the subjugated Baltic States, Byelorussia and Ukraine, they are open to sabotage both in peace and war.
In order to secure her industries — her arsenals — against air attack, Russia has adopted a policy of dispersion; but, seemingly, has overlooked that the remoteness of many of them from the more probable theatres of war permits present-day aircraft to cut them off from the latter by destroying the inter-linking communications. Actually, there would be no need to destroy the industrial centers themselves, for if the few main rail junctions in the U.S.S.R. are put out of action, the fewness of the railroads in most cases will render the deflection of traffic impossible.
Further still, the greater the dispersion the more difficult does it become for the Russian air force to prevent either the systematic destruction of the industrial centers or the railroads leading to and from them. Relative to this, it should not be overlooked that, on account of climatic conditions as well as the great distances to be travelled, the replacement of railroad traction by motor transport will generally be out of the question. Also, that, unlike the United States, the U.S.S.R. possesses no extensive system of pipe lines for the distribution of oil and petrol.
The conclusions to be drawn from this strategical survey are: (1) that the technical equipment of Russia’s fighting forces will be at its best at the opening of war, and that, should her railroads be paralyzed, it will rapidly deteriorate; and (2) that, because of this, it may be expected that, as in the past, Russia will rely on mass manpower attacks in order to make good her technical deficiencies.
Clearly, then, adding to the demands of the Russian army within the U.S.S.R. will lead to its numerical reduction in the areas of operations, and this can be effected by the assistance of the subjugated peoples. For them, the expanse of the U.S.S.R., when coupled with outside air supply and assistance, facilitates revolt, which simultaneously will be difficult to suppress should rail communications be paralyzed. Also it should not be overlooked that a vast belt of labour and concentration camps, in which millions of slave workers are imprisoned, stretches across Northern Siberia and Manchuria, and that the first of these areas is within transpolar air range of the United States, and the second at no great distance from Korea and Japan. All these camps are potential centers of revolt. Therefore the more the Kremlin can be compelled to garrison them, the less numerous will be its troops in the areas of military operations.
When all these factors are considered, it will be seen that Russia’s fighting manpower, great though it is, can as a whole no more be concentrated than can that of her opponents. Though the latter are an association of autonomous nations tending to diverge rather than to unite, the U.S.S.R. is a despotism of subjugated nations, forcibly united by terror, and inhibited by disruption. In fact, Russia is a giant with feet of clay, and the more her fighting forces are dissipated on internal security, the more formidable do those of her opponents become.
From what I have now written, I hope I have made it clear that, in order to overthrow the fire-raising Colossus, the technical superiority of the Western nations is not in itself enough. What they are lacking is not power to wage war, for though power may still be insufficient, there is no insuperable difficulty in rendering it sufficient. Instead, it is lade of faith in their way of life, and lack of courage in proclaiming it.
They must understand that the sword of liberty is but dead metal as long as it is sheathed. It is because they fear to unsheathe it that they lade a positive policy towards the nations forcibly and fraudulently incorporated in the Soviet Union. Yet without a positive policy they can never hope to exploit the seething discontent behind the Iron Curtain, and be it remembered that, without counting the subjugated peoples of the U.S.S.R., ten independent states of old Europe, inhabited by some 100,000,000 people are now under Soviet dominance. Of these millions and the millions more in the U.S.S.R., the vast majority are potential allies, but until the Western nations openly proclaim them to be such, the sword of liberty will remain sheathed.
If the West is to gain the sympathies of the enslaved peoples, it must inspire them. To think in terms of the atomic bomb is autocratic; to think in terms of liberation is democratic, and though the atomic bomb has its uses, they must be weighed against the psychological effects they are likely to produce. To use this weapon indiscriminately is to repeat Hitler’s blunder, and the way in which it is used will determine whether the millions of enslaved peoples in Europe and the U.S.S.R. are to be the allies of the West or the unwilling defenders of Moscow.
Because from past history there is no reason to suppose that a change of regime in Moscow will call a halt to the age-old urge of Russian expansion, the aim of the Western Powers should coincide with the aim of the A.B.N. This means that the Soviet Empire must be dealt with as was the Turkish — that is, split up into its component parts, each part becoming an independent country.
The first step towards achieving this end is the formation of all freedom-loving peoples on both sides of the Iron Curtain into a common Anti-Bolshevik Front. The second is the creation of a Psychological Warfare General Staff which will give teeth to this union, and it should comprise three main branches — Operations, Intelligence and Supply.
The duties of the first should be to plan and organize partisan activities within all subjugated countries, and train refugees and form them into the nuclei of national armies, around which the enslaved peoples can build up their fighting forces on or after the outbreak of war.
The duties of the second should be to collect and co-ordinate information gathered by the underground movements; train intelligence agents for work not only behind the Iron Curtain, but also in all countries which in war time may be overrun by the Russians, so that guerrilla war may be organized in their rear, and by intensive propaganda keep the spirit of counterrevolution alive.
The duties of the Supply Branch should be to make ready on a vast scale all the requirements of guerrilla warfare: the provision of arms, ammunition, explosives, medical stores, rations, radios, etc., etc., as well as earmark the aircraft needed to carry them and also personnel to prearranged dropping points, so that, when the flag falls, the psychological bomb may be detonated from the Arctic shores to the Mediterranean and from the Pacific to the Elbe.
If these things are done, the Western nations need have no fears. But, if they are not done, though the West may win the next war, in its winning it will reap its own destruction and may well end in Bolshevizing the world.
Printed by Buchdruckerei Gerd SchlautkStter, Munchen 12, Westendstr. 69
