Free The Third World War by John Hackett Page B

the most open shows of defiance, including those who had shot the mayor of Wroclaw. This promise was honoured until mid-January. The communist government went on ruling the country, but—it seemed to some (perhaps to communist mayors especially)—in name only. In Moscow there was growing concern.
    A special meeting of the Soviet Politburo was called for 14 November, together with the heads of government of all the republics in the Soviet U nion. For this meeting the Kremlin leaders asked Academician Y. I. Ryabukhin, a Harvard-educated Muscovite sometimes known in the West as the best backroom Kissinger the Russians had, to prepare a position paper. This was what he wrote, in a document labelled ‘most secret’.
    THE RYABUKHIN REPORT
    1 Although President-elect Thompson has said some regrettable things, he is unlikely ever to countenance nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, just as we are unlikely to countenance it on the USA . Both superpowers have to bear in mind the high probability of second-strike destruction.
    2 Despite this, we in the governing structure of the Soviet Union now face a situation which demands attention. Of the 180 heads of government in the different countries of the world, about 100 go to bed every night wondering whether they may be shot in a coup d’etat in the morning. Except in Stalin’s day, men in the top posts in the Soviet Union have not had to fear that. Now they might well soon be doing so. After what happened in Poland there is a distinct possibility of coups d’etat against several socialist governments in Eastern Europe. It cannot be wholly ruled out in some republics of the Soviet Union itself, especially in the Far East and south.
    3 Nevertheless, we should not, at this juncture, send Soviet troops into Poland to arrest those workers in, for example, Wroclaw, who have been allowed almost literally to get away with murder. It has been thought unwise to order units of the Polish Army to open fire on the workers concerned. There are units of the Red Army which might conceivably also be reluctant to obey such orders. Only if the Polish government is overthrown by a plainly revanchist regime, or if similar events take place in other socialist countries (above all in the German Democratic Republic), should considerable Soviet forces be sent in to rectify the situation. Yugoslavia is a different matter (see note on the Yugoslav situation, below).
    4 The position in Poland makes it important that we should put the Americans in a position of weakness somewhere else, and ensure that some humiliating retreats have to be undertaken by the Americans during the early weeks of President Thompson’s Administration. This can be called a Bay of Pigs strategy.
    5 It will be remembered that in the early days of the Kennedy Administration in 1961 our agents among the so-called Cuban emigres in America, who have been in many respects useful, helped to instigate the bound-to-be-abortive American-backed invasion of the Bay of Pigs against Fidel Castro, who knew every detail of the invasion plan in advance. This humiliation of the Americans enabled Soviet penetration of South America to continue unchecked throughout the Democratic Administration of 1961-8, except that by placing offensive missiles in Cuba in 1963 Khrushchev unwisely pushed the Americans too far.
    6 Unfortunately, we cannot precisely repeat the Bay of Pigs, because the United States is not preparing to invade anywhere unsuccessfully during the early days of the Thompson Administration. We should therefore try to set up situations where President Thompson in his early days will be forced to order or accept a retreat by America and its allies from a situation created by us.
    7 A ‘Thompson retreat’ of this sort should be engineered in order to check a possible ‘momentum of revolt’ which may otherwise begin to be felt by the Soviet Union. At risk, if there is no such early retreat, may be the lives and livelihoods of many who work within