Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy toward the Indochina Conflict, 1945-1963 (review)

Confronting Vietnam, Ilya V. Gaiduk's second book on Soviet policy toward Southeast Asia, is the prequel to his groundbreaking The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1996), which covered the Vietnam War from the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 to the Paris Peace agreements in January 1973. In this new volume, Gaiduk, who is based at the Institute of Universal History in Moscow, deals with the period from roughly the Geneva Conference in 1954 to the assassinations of Ngo Dinh Diem and John F. Kennedy in late 1963, with a short first chapter on the late years of the Stalin era and a concluding chapter that summarizes the eight months preceding the Gulf of Tonkin incident. As the somewhat paradoxical title suggests, Soviet policy toward Indochina revolved around the incipient Vietnam War. Moscow did not see its own policies toward Laos or Cambodia in unrelated terms.

Given the Soviet Union's poor experiences with Asian Communism since the 1920s and the raging Korean War in the early 1950s, Iosif Stalin was reluctant to support the Vietnamese Communists. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, tried to de-escalate the conflict in Southeast Asia first through diplomatic means and then through deliberate disengagement. At the Geneva Conference in 1954, Moscow cooperated with Beijing, which had its own reasons for seeking an end to the Indochina War, in the hope of achieving a settlement in Vietnam that could not but disappoint Hanoi. Although the Soviet Union subsequently provided much-needed economic assistance to North Vietnam, it deliberately chose to let China play a central role in supplying such aid, thus making Soviet actions increasingly dependent on Chinese cooperation and good will. Khrushchev's commitment to the North Vietnamese comrades faltered once Sino-Soviet relations started to crumble in the late 1950s. The failure of all three Western powers—the United States, Great Britain, and France—to implement the Geneva accords, and Mao Zedong's readiness to exploit Khrushchev's missteps in international affairs to his own advantage in the festering Sino-Soviet rift, provided Khrushchev with additional incentives to disengage from Southeast Asia in the early 1960s. Although Soviet leaders clearly worried about Washington's expansion in the region, they believed that neither the Soviet Union nor the United States had any conflicting interests there important enough to imperil East-West détente.

When discussing the Laos crisis of the early 1960s, Gaiduk not only provides a window into an often forgotten episode of the Indochina conflict but also reveals how the major themes of the book intersect closely with each other. The Laotian crisis stemmed from a domestic struggle for power between politically opposed members of the extended royal family, but it was drawn into the Vietnam War because of the long-standing, close relations between the North Vietnamese and their Laotian rebel comrades. After 1954, Hanoi's stalling tactics in implementing the Geneva accord provisions regarding Laos in the face of Moscow's and Beijing's explicit will to do so, and the later Sino-Soviet rift over global strategy (national revolution versus détente), exacerbated and prolonged the crisis needlessly. Combined with Kennedy's increasing worries about Communist expansion in Southeast Asia, these fault lines within the Communist world not only prevented the 1961 Laos agreements from being implemented but also spoiled any chance for a negotiated settlement in Vietnam.

Together with Qiang Zhai's China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), Gaiduk's book fills a wide gap in the historiography, which hitherto tended to overlook the central roles Moscow and Beijing played in the unfolding Vietnam War. Gaiduk also rectifies the faulty impression, often promoted in the Chinese literature on this topic, that Moscow was merely an appendix to Beijing's Vietnam policy. Although Gaiduk conducted extensive research in the Russian archives, especially in the foreign ministry archive (AVPRF) where access to...