Russia's Vietnam War

The roots of the Vietnam War lay in Vietnamese resistance to French colonialism, but after 1946 the conflict became subsumed in America’s drive for global hegemony, the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the reemergence of China as a regional Asian power. It was an international war, engaging not only the prime belligerents—France, the United States, and Vietnam—but also Laos, Cambodia, the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and allies within both Cold War blocs. Despite its international complexities and significance, by far the largest portion of English-language historiography on the war deals with topics associated with “America in the Vietnam War” and the “Vietnam War in America.” ¹ There are several significant works in English on the Vietnamese experience of revolution and war, but far fewer on the Soviet, Chinese, and lesser actors’ roles in the struggle. Rarer still are studies of the war in a global, multinational setting—in any language. ²

National bias—a form of provincialism shared and sometimes surpassed by historians in other countries—is surely among the many reasons for the scarcity of bilateral and multilateral American studies of the war. But the most important reason is likely that of limited access to documentary sources in Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union. The fortunes of battle put many Vietnamese materials in the hands of U.S. intelligence agencies, and they eventually found their way to scholars. The Vietnamese published some party materials and a few official documentary collections during and after the war, and the postwar political flap over POWs and MIAs led to selected archival declassifications in Vietnam by the early 1990s. With the end of the Cold War and continuing rapprochement between the PRC and the West, the doors to Chinese archives and academic publications were partially opened. A parallel development took place in the former Soviet Union following the abortive 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev’s government and the subsequent fall from power of the Communist party. The degree and ease of access to documents in these three nations, however, does not match that in the United States, which itself often leaves much to be desired. ³

Ilya V. Gaiduk’s book on the role of the Soviet Union in the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1973 had its genesis in these post-Cold War developments. A Russian historian of Soviet-American relations and a research fellow at the Institute of World History in Moscow who speaks and writes in Russian and English, Gaiduk was involved in cooperative projects between Russian and American institutions after 1991 to open Soviet Communist party (CPSU) archival materials. His interest in the Vietnam War led him to a valuable collection of secret and top-secret papers on wartime relations between the USSR and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, or North Vietnam). Encouraged by colleagues in Russia and at the Cold War International History Project in Washington, D.C., and assisted by fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center and the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Gaiduk continued his research and completed his manuscript even after the papers he had examined in Moscow were once more locked up. Russian leaders by 1993 had decided for political reasons to reverse the liberal declassification policies they had only recently adopted.

What Gaiduk found surprised him. The official Soviet government line had been that the USSR was the major supplier and champion of the DRV and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) for reasons mainly having to do with communist solidarity. Gaiduk explains that relations between Moscow and Hanoi were more complicated and Soviet motives more selfish. In the years after the Geneva Accords of 1954, the Soviet Union was modestly involved in Vietnamese affairs and unenthusiastic in its backing of the DRV and NLF goal of national reunification. This minimalist Soviet policy continued until August 1964, when the Tonkin Gulf crisis forced Moscow to acknowledge the...