And the third Daman. Also forgotten
In a remote Kazakh corner
On 13 of August 1969 of the PRC, having sensed that in order to put Moscow in its place, Beijing would be supported by Western countries, it launched a new provocation on the border with the USSR. In terms of scale, it was almost on an equal footing with Damansky and even surpassed Damansky-2 - a clash near the Goldinsky island (for more details see “VO” here).
This time, the Chinese chose a rather remote corner - on the East Kazakhstan site near Lake Zhalanashkol. On the morning of 13 August, at first only a dozen Chinese soldiers crossed the Soviet border at the Zhalanashkol outpost. By the 7 hours of the morning, they began to deliberately dig in. But about a hundred Chinese have already accumulated beyond the border. Soviet border guards did not want to shed blood. But they didn’t react to all warnings from that side ...
Soon, the border was violated by 12 more Chinese soldiers, who moved along the control-track strip to the Kamennaya hill. On two armored personnel carriers, ours cut their way, but after short negotiations, Chinese soldiers opened fire from machine guns. Soviet border guards were actually forced to respond.
Armed with rifle and anti-tank weapons the Chinese continued to cross the border, occupying one of the hills. Border guards in three armored personnel carriers entered into battle with them. Under the command of senior lieutenant Olszewski, a group of eight soldiers, supported by two armored personnel carriers, went behind the Chineses, and they took up all-round defense.
The height of the Right was attacked by another group of border guards, who lost one killed and eight wounded. But the height was taken, and the Chinese trenches were bombarded with grenades. Another Soviet border guard was mortally wounded - Private V. Ryazanov. By 9 hours, the height was repelled, and the Chinese no longer planned attacks.
There were a lot of weapons on the battlefield, mostly Soviet-made 1967-69. with markings of Romania and North Korea. This provocation cost Beijing more than 50 killed and wounded, the USSR - in 12 killed and wounded.
But the “signal” was given to the Russians - it is possible that Beijing’s main goal was to show Moscow that a number of its allies were de facto on the side of the PRC. And as an auxiliary task - to "demonstrate" territorial claims to the USSR and on this remote section of the border.
Such allies, such friends
It is now well known that from April 1969, shortly after the battle on Damansky Island, the re-export by Romania and the DPRK of Soviet small arms to China began to increase. By mid-August 1969, shortly after the conflict, these shipments almost doubled compared to the fall of 1968. It was then, at the end of the notorious Danube operation in Czechoslovakia, that the aforementioned re-export began.
It is no less characteristic that on the eve of a new Chinese provocation, US President Richard Nixon, along with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, paid official visits to Pakistan Lahore and then Bucharest. At the same time, Romania and Pakistan agreed to mediate in the establishment of high-level Chinese-American contacts, and intelligence equipment from the United States began to enter China through China.
Meanwhile, at the 11 of September 1969 in a Beijing airport, a meeting of the prime ministers of the USSR and the PRC, Alexei Kosygin and Zhou Enlai, was already scheduled. Its agenda included primarily the border issue. The Chinese side, it seems, decided ahead of time, through a new demonstration of strength, to strengthen their positions.
However, the meeting at the Beijing airport was not canceled, and there both parties agreed to resolve disputes first at the mutual Siberian-Far Eastern border. But, as you know, from 1970 of the year all of them, as a rule, were decided in favor of the PRC. In Beijing, then they realized that the issue would also be resolved in the area after almost 400 square. km at the Zhalanashkol lake. And especially this question did not pedal afterwards.
Much later, according to the Kazakh-Chinese agreement in Almaty from 4 on July 1998 on the clarification of the mutual border, signed by Nurslutan Nazarbayev and Jiang Zemin, that section was transferred to China. But at the end of the 60's in Moscow, they realized that the PRC enjoys quite substantive support from a number of Soviet allies, more precisely, supposedly allies. In Romania, for example, official and very active criticism of the mentioned Danube operation continued at that time, and in the DPRK - although unofficially, criticism of Khrushchev's anti-Stalinism and the same operation in Czechoslovakia.
But Moscow, for obvious political reasons, chose to refrain from pressure on Bucharest and Pyongyang over the re-export of Soviet weapons to the PRC. For the Soviet leadership feared a new split in the socialist community in favor of the PRC, which, in turn, would be beneficial to the United States and the West as a whole. And it could also lead to the military-political bloc of Romania, not only with the then Stalin-pro-Chinese Albania, but also with Titan Yugoslavia. Recall that socialist Yugoslavia then regularly obstructed the USSR on the world stage in the framework of the "Non-Aligned Movement" initiated by it from the West.
When Beijing kept quarreling with Moscow, Washington and Islamabad also “added” to Bucharest and Pyongyang as true friends of China. 1-2 On August Nixon and Kissinger met with the then head of Pakistan, General Yahya Khan, in Lahore. The main topic of the talks was the options for "greater support for communist China, while (as G. Kissinger said) Mao Zedong is alive."
At that time, the work of the transpakistan transport corridor, which also passed through the territory of the PRC, became more regular, through which not only civilian products, but not only from the USA, began to be sent to a larger volume. The Chinese embassy in Pakistan was informed by the Pakistani Foreign Ministry in early August 1969 about the plans of the US leadership regarding the official visit of Nixon and Kissinger to the PRC.
And in Bucharest, Nixon, meeting with the Chinese ambassador Liu Shenkuan, announced his desire to meet with the leaders of the PRC somewhere and support his "anti-hegemonic policy." In turn, Nicolae Ceausescu offered his personal mediation in organizing such a meeting, which was accepted by Washington and Beijing. And in mid-June 1971, Mr. Ceausescu personally confirmed these initiatives in Beijing to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.
Fruitful mediation
The mediation of Bucharest and Islamabad has borne fruit: Kissinger first visited Beijing in early July 1971 - note, shortly after Ceausescu's visit to Beijing. The first official visit of US leaders to the PRC took place, as you know, in February 1972, indicating since then their more active cooperation in countering the USSR.
By the way, it is very characteristic that such "lightning" visits of Nixon to Pakistan, and then together with Kissinger and Romania took place precisely on the eve of the conflict at Zhalanashkol ... All these factors, of course, influenced Moscow’s restrained political reaction to this conflict. This is also confirmed by the fact that they did not mention him in the central and regional Soviet media (except for a brief message in the large circulation of the local border post).
But there were also internal factors of Soviet restraint. Firstly, until the beginning of the 80-s, more than 50 underground Stalinist-Maoist groups acted in the USSR, initiated by Beijing and called in their leaflets and pamphlets to "overthrow the domination of the revisionist-traitors of the great Lenin-Stalin cause", who planned sabotage and terrorist attacks . Moreover, in return for the neutralized such groups, new ones constantly appeared. But after the resignation of Mr. Hua Guofeng, Mao's Stalinist successor, at the end of June 1981, Beijing's support for such groups became minimal.
Secondly, in the USSR, at the turn of the 60's and 70's, a systemic social crisis was ripening. Moreover, Brezhnev and others like them saw the main reason for this is that Kosygin’s notorious reforms (for more details see “VO” here) lead the state about the growing social and material needs of the population. What could negatively affect the growth of the country's economy and its state of defense.
These are the assessments made by the Secretary General of the Central Committee of the CPSU, L. I. Brezhnev, at the plenum of the Central Committee in December1968:
As you know, Kosygin reforms were practically curtailed at the beginning of the 70's. But in general, numerous interrelated factors determined the inability for the USSR to get involved in a large-scale military conflict with the PRC. They also predetermined repeated Soviet concessions to Beijing in border issues.
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