The Enemy
Peter Kemp
History is on our side. We will bury you', Kruschev warned the West in ovember 1956, just after he had crushed the Hungarian Revolution. Whether his tYPically flamboyant outburst was inspired by anger or by alcohol, it was a warning the West should not have ignored. 'Your grandchildren will live under Communism', he told an American audience a little later. tie meant, of course, under Soviet Corn- niunism, and in this valuable and very time- ly book General Jan Sejna gives us, from hls own experience, a good idea of what it is like to live under Russian rule.
Time is what the Soviet leaders most heeded in the 1950s and 1960s to perfect their plans to dominate the world, and the West has given them time. The former EgYptian editor, Mohammed Heikal, Nasser's confidant, has recorded a conver- sation with Kruschev during an interna- tional crisis in the 1960s in which Kruschev told him 'We are not ready yet'. The 'yet' is especially significant in view of the vast in- crease since then in Russian military might. , Born in 1927 of a very poor peasant fami- 13, living in the great Bohemian forest near the Bavarian frontier, Jan Sejna became at an early age a convinced Communist and an active Party member. Through hard work nd exceptional ability — so he tells us her ose rapidly in the Party organisation and on the political side of the Army. At the age of 27 he was 'a Colonel, a Corn- lnissar, an M.P., and a member of the Cen- tral Committee of the Czech Communist Party'; at 40 he was a General.
As Chief of Staff to the Ministry of 1)efence and de facto secretary to the Military Committee of the Central Commit-
tee — the highest policy-making body in the Party on military and intelligence matters — he saw all correspondence that passed between the Czech and Soviet General Staffs, including — most important for Western readers — details of all strategic plans. His information is of particular relevance because the Russians depended heavily on Czech co-operation in their plans for the penetration and subversion of Western Europe. When he fled from Czechoslovakia in February 1968 General Sejna was the highest ranking Communist ever to defect.
His book gives a rare glimpse into the privileged life-style of high officials in a Soviet satellite country — and of their families — and into the endless maze of conspiracy and intrigue through which they had to feel their way. It contains some in- teresting portraits of the Soviet and Czech leaders of those days, whom he knew well: the ebullient Kruschev, for whom he ex- presses admiration and deep affection, which he says were fully shared by the peo- ple of Russia; Brezhnev, 'the most chauvinist and bigoted Russian nationalist I have ever met', who, when he smiles 'looks as if he wants to bite you'; the arrogant and overbearing Soviet Marshals who treated all the satellite peoples like dirt; the ascetic and humourless Czech President Novotny whose playboy son was Sejna's close friend; and finally Alexandr Dubcek, with whom Sejna quarrelled after warning him that his impetuous and radical reforms would in- evitably lead to Soviet military intervention. We are told, incidentally, that Dubcek owed his election as First Secretary to the influence of Brezhnev whose protégé he had been and who believed Dubcek would pro- tect Soviet interests. 'Soviet interests' meant, to Brezhnev, the total subordination of Czechoslovakia to the USSR, and General Sejna gives a detailed account of the constrictions it involved. All activity, political, military and economic, must con- form with Soviet directives, and all deck sions, from the Czech Politburo downwards, had to receive Soviet approval; communications and discussions between Czech and Soviet officials were always in Russian, for not even the Soviet 'advisers' bothered to learn Czech.
'If ever a system totally corrupted its ser- vants', writes Sejna, 'that was, and is,.
Communism; and when Communism is im- posed by a foreign power as brutal and chauvinist as the Soviet Union, it not only corrupts, it degrades'. And later on he adds: 'The further I advanced in the Communist Party, the more I understood that the Communist system was a self-serving bureaucracy designed to maintain in power a cynical elite'. There are some lighter touches, however; notably the furious reaction of Che Guevara when 'he was offered, in Prague, a Havana cigar 'made in Czechoslovakia': and the answer of prisoners in one of Stalin's labour camps to a new arrival who told them he had been given 25 years for doing absolutely nothing: 'You must have committed some crime', they insisted. 'For doing nothing you only get ten years'.
But the most important, and alarming, part of the book lies in the chapters dealing with the Soviet 'Long Term Strategic Plan' for the subversion and eventual take-over of the West — the first account of it, so far as I know, to be published. Sejna's position gave him access to almost every detail of the plan, and he gives a synopsis of it, country by country.
Of immediate topical interest, for exam- ple, are the directives from the Kremlin passed on by the Czechs to the IRA: to establish 'a democratic and socialist regime in Northern Ireland as a prelude to the unification of Ireland as a Socialist state' and to 'extend the battle to the mainland of Britain, to increase its impact on the British Government and people'.
Within Britain 'progressive forces must take over the trade unions and penetrate the Labour Party', and few would contend they have failed in this objective. 'It was also essential to destroy the military and security organisations, including the police force'. Well, at least they are trying.
Sejna dismisses both detente and Euro- communism as Soviet ploys to gain time and to allay Western fears and suspicions; and he warns us that, although some of the details of the plan will have changed since his defection, because it is subject to cons- tant revision, the essence and objectives re- main unchanged. Those objectives, he asserts, 'have been, are, and will remain ut- terly inimical to and subversive of the freedoms enjoyed by the states of the Western World'.
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