On September 2, 2005, the Vietnamese people celebrated the 60th anniversary of the declaration of independence of their homeland. The fact that this significant milestone in its history coincided with the 60th anniversary of the victory of our people in the Great Patriotic War and the end of World War II is not a game of historical chance. In 1940, French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia), like many other Asian countries, was occupied by militaristic Japan. The August revolution of 1945, which brought Vietnam long-awaited independence, began immediately after news agencies in Hanoi received reports about the defeat of the Soviet troops in Northern China of the million-strong Japanese Kwantung army.

"The Vietnamese people," Ho Chi Minh, the first president of independent Vietnam, later wrote, " will always be grateful to the Soviet Union, which defeated the fascists in Europe and Asia and made a decisive contribution to saving humanity from Fascist slavery. The victory of the Soviet Union contributed to the triumph of the August Revolution in our country."

Historically, this is a very accurate estimate. Moreover, fate has generally decreed in such a way that almost the entire long-term struggle of the Vietnamese people, first for national liberation, and then in defense of the already won independence, was inextricably linked with our country. Despite the ambiguity of today's assessments of the international consequences of the October Revolution and the activities of the Communist International (Comintern), there can hardly be any doubt that these two factors contributed to the acceleration of the national liberation movement in the colonial and dependent countries and, ultimately, to the complete collapse of the world colonial system. This was especially evident in Vietnam.

NGUYEN THE PATRIOT SPEAKS RUSSIAN

As a young man, Ho Chi Minh City had "one but burning passion" - to see his homeland free and independent, which in the mid-19th century became a colonial possession of France. To get involved in active political activities, he left Vietnam and in 1918 in Paris joined the Socialist Party of France, taking the party name-Nguyen Ai Quoc, which means Nguyen the Patriot. However, he is disappointed - the Socialist Party, to his surprise, does not set the task of liberating the colonies.

According to Ho Chi Minh's memoirs, his life took a sharp turn in one of the July days of 1920, when he got his hands on the newspaper "Yumanite", where the program documents of the Comintern on the colonial question were published. After reading them, the young Vietnamese patriot exclaimed: "My poor, tortured compatriots, this is what we need! This is the path to our liberation!" It is only natural that in December of the same year, at the Tours Congress of the Socialist Party, he resolutely voted for its accession to the Comintern and became the first communist in colonial Vietnam.

In June 1923, as a representative of the peoples of French Indochina, Nguyen Ai Quoc came to Moscow. From this moment on, the multifaceted activities of the future leader of the Vietnamese people and his closest associates, the history of the national liberation movement in Vietnam, and the long-standing struggle of Vietnamese patriots to defend the independence and unity of their homeland will be firmly linked with the Soviet Union, Moscow, and the Russian people.

Ho Chi Minh's arrival in Russia was accompanied by downright mystical events and meetings. Just imagine: a very young, inexperienced representative of a distant, even mysterious country unknown to anyone at that time, who also led a strictly conspiratorial lifestyle, arrives. And suddenly it turns out that about his first, short-lived stay in Russia, history has preserved an unexpectedly large number of sometimes amazing documentary evidence.

First of all, the exact date of his crossing of the USSR border is known. So, the archives carefully preserved the "passing certificate" in the name of the photographer Chen Wang, "making a trip", issued to him instead of a passport by the RSFSR representative office in Germany. "Photographer Chen Wang" arrived on the German steamer Hamburg in Petrograd on June 30, 1923-this is clearly evidenced by the well-preserved photo of the young Ho Chi Minh on this document and the stamp of the border guard of the Petrograd port indicating the date of arrival of the foreign passenger.

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Further. In the archives of the State Film Fund of Russia and today, apparently, you can get acquainted with the amazing newsreel footage. On one of the July days of 1924, participants of folk festivals on Vorobyovy Gory throw up a young Asian man in their arms. It turns out that this is "a representative of the peoples of Indochina Nguyen Ai Quoc", which in two decades the world will recognize under the name Ho Chi Minh. And on July 29, Moscow's Rabochaya Gazeta presented readers with a beautifully crafted portrait of a Vietnamese revolutionary. The author of the portrait, as it appears from the caption under it, A. M. Rodchenko-then a novice graphic artist, and later became widely known in creative circles as a designer, master of photography, theater and film artist.

But the most incredible intersection of human destinies is the appearance in the December 1923 issue of Ogonyok magazine of Osip Mandelstam's essay: "Nguyen Ai Quoc. Visiting the Comintern." In those years, the poet worked in the magazine as a reporter and the first of the journalists met with an unknown "annamit" (that was the name of the Vietnamese people at that time) and took an extensive interview with him, the content of which is sometimes marked with the seal of providence.

"The Annamite people, the peasants, live immersed in a deep, pitch - black night - no newspapers, no idea what is going on in the world, night, real night..." Ho Chi Minh told the author of the essay. "When I was a boy of about thirteen, I first heard the French words liberty, equality, fraternity... And I wanted to get acquainted with the French civilization, to feel out what is hidden behind these words."

"Nguyen Ai Quoc utters the word 'civilization' with disgust," writes O. Mandelstam. "He's traveled almost the entire colonial world, been to North and Central Africa, and seen enough of it." The future famous Russian poet finished his story about the future president of Vietnam with significant words: "Innate tact and delicacy breathed all the appearance of Nguyen Ai Quoc... It breathes culture, not European culture, but perhaps the culture of the future."

Ho Chi Minh lived in Moscow for a year and a half, and his main place of work was the Eastern Section of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. Today, a granite memorial plaque on the wall of an old building on Mokhovaya Street, which is located about thirty meters from the Manege, reminds us of this.

At the end of 1924, he left Russia and came to Canton (Guangzhou), where by that time a large number of Vietnamese emigrants had settled, who were forced to flee their country to escape political persecution. At this time, power in Southern China was in the hands of the Kuomintang Party, headed by the idol of the revolutionary-minded part of Chinese society, Sun Yat-sen. Two years ago, he formulated his "new political course" - an alliance with the Chinese Communists, an alliance with Soviet Russia, and support for the workers 'and peasants' movement.

As part of this course, political and military advisers from the Soviet Union were invited to Canton. Thus, the well-known Bolshevik figure M. M. Borodin became the chief political adviser to the Central Committee of the Kuomintang and the South Chinese government, and prominent Soviet military leaders V. K. Blucher (future Marshal of the Red Army), P. A. Pavlov, M. V. Kuibyshev, and V. M. Primakov became teachers of the Wampu Academy, which was opened on the initiative of Sun Yat-sen to train political and military personnel. revolutions.

These Russian representatives became colleagues and teachers of Ho Chi Minh, who with their help opened political science courses among Vietnamese emigrants, launched the publication of the revolutionary newspaper Thanh Nien (Youth), and then created the first Vietnamese left - wing organization, the Vietnam Revolutionary Youth Association. The association and the Thanh Nien newspaper brought up a powerful cohort of fighters for national liberation, including future leaders of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Tong Duc Thang, Le Duan, Truong Tinh, Pham Van Dong, Hoang Quoc Viet, prominent figures of the liberation movement who gave their lives for the victory of the revolution-Le Hong Phong, Nguyen Thi Min Khai, Ho Tung Mau, Ngo Za Ty, Ha Hui Tap and many others.

It was these people who formed the core of the Communist Party of Vietnam created by Ho Chi Minh in 1930, which in its very first program documents clearly defined its strategic goals - the overthrow of the colonialist government and national liberation. This almost automatically made it the only organized national political force in Vietnam that enjoyed the sympathy and support of all patriotic segments of the population.

While remaining loyal to the communist ideology and defending primarily the interests of the working people, Ho Chi Minh and the CPV, which he led, at the same time skillfully attracted representatives of the national bourgeoisie, landlords, and clerical circles to the side of the anti-colonial forces, which made it possible, even at the most difficult stages of the revolution's development, to oppose its enemies with sufficient force.-

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exactly the broad alliance of the Vietnamese nation. Many representatives of the old, so-called "Confucian intelligentsia" in their memoirs noted that they joined the revolution under the influence primarily of the personality of Ho Chi Minh, in whom they saw a real hope for the future national liberation and revival of Vietnam.

THEY WERE KNOWN ONLY BY SIGHT

In September 1928, a short, fit young man appeared in the aviation school of the city of Borisoglebsk. Litvinov-he introduced himself to the cadets. They were surprised: the surname is Russian, but it looks like a friend from Asia. The most persistent ones tried to find out where he was from, what his parents were doing. But the new guy just laughed it off and changed the subject. One thing he did not hide was that he passionately loves aviation, dreams of becoming an air ace, and that he came to Borisoglebsk from Leningrad, where he had already studied at the military theoretical school of the air forces.

After several months of intense training and training flights, Litvinov suddenly disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared. The cadets were told that he had been seconded to another school. None of them ever found out that their Asian comrade was the Vietnamese revolutionary Le Hong Fong, who had illegally arrived in Russia from Canton on the recommendation of Nguyen Ai Quoc.

To this day, in the museum of the Borisoglebsky School, you can find a photo of Le Hong Fong on the honor roll of former cadets. Although the liberation of Vietnam was still very far away, and the creation of the Vietnamese Air Force was even further away, Le Hong Phong can actually be considered the first Vietnamese pilot, the forerunner of thousands of Vietnamese aces who heroically defended the skies of Vietnam from the air attacks of the most powerful power in the world in 1965 - 1973.

..Upon arriving in Moscow, Le Hong Fong was enrolled in the University of the Workers of the East, where future revolutionary leaders of the colonial countries of Asia and Africa studied. After graduating from the university, the rector's office recommended a capable Vietnamese student to graduate school, but he did not manage to defend his dissertation.

In 1932, he reappeared in Southern China, where he started publishing an underground newspaper, and after three years of hard work, he won the first congress of the newly created Communist Party of Vietnam. A few months after the congress, Le Hong Fong returned to Moscow as a delegate to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern. The second visit to our capital was doubly joyful for him.

"I don't remember my parents at all," said Le Hong Fong's daughter, whom I met in the 1980s, " because I was born in prison and was separated from them. Only when I grew up, I learned about the fate of my mother-Nguyen Thi Minh Khai and my father. Although my parents lived in neighboring villages in Ngean Province, they only really met in the spring of 1935 on a train that took them from Vladivostok to Moscow. It had been a long journey, and they had probably talked about everything and realized how close they were to each other. They got married in Moscow. Maybe one of the Moscow district registry offices still has a document on the registration of their marriage. Young underground workers carried their love, which broke out under the Moscow sky, through their entire short but glorious life.

In the spring of 1936, a successful merchant appeared in Saigon. He dressed immaculately, and made friends with French manufacturers, Chinese bankers, and Vietnamese merchants. Apparently, his business was booming. The colonial police could not have imagined that the successful businessman in an elegant boater hat was Le Hong Fong, secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, who had recently returned from Moscow. Using a well-organized cover, the underground worker did a great job in mobilizing the forces of the revolution in the two years that fate allotted him before his arrest.

His most important achievement was the convening of an extraordinary plenum of the Central Committee of the party, at which a fateful decision was made for the Vietnamese revolution to move to the practical implementation of the course of creating a broad anti-colonial popular front, actively using legal and semi-legal forms of work in order to " involve all classes, parties, organizations, religious groups and nationalities seeking to towards national liberation and democracy".

This strategy has become a powerful weapon in the hands of Vietnamese patriots at various stages of the national liberation movement.-

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traffic control. So, in 1940, the Vietminh Front was created, under the banner of which the August Revolution of 1945 won. And in 1960, the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam was born, under whose banner the Vietnamese people withstood a long armed confrontation with the United States and achieved the reunification of the North and South of the country.

...In the summer of 1938, Le Hong Fong was arrested - the hand of a traitor intervened. But the police did not find any evidence of his revolutionary activities with the underground worker. He was jailed on charges of carrying a fake ID card. Hard evidence was needed to expose a skilled conspirator. And this opportunity seemed to have presented itself - his combat girlfriend had fallen into a police trap. In 1940, an armed uprising broke out in the South of Vietnam, led by Minh Khai. After the uprising was defeated, all its leaders, including her, were sentenced to death.

Terrible was the last meeting of the young couple. It seems that not so long ago they were walking hand in hand in Sokolniki, along the embankment of the Moskva River, listening to the Kremlin chimes. And now they were standing in front of each other, shackled, in the middle of an interrogation cell in Saigon prison. Their last date in life is called a confrontation. The main task of the jailers is to extract from them the confession that they are husband and wife, then this will be enough to send Le Hong Fong to the guillotine. However, it was not possible to achieve this - neither a word nor a glance did the underground workers give away that they even knew each other. At least one of them had to stay alive - for the cause of the revolution, for the native creature-a newborn daughter named Hong Min. This name they put together from parts of their names, and it turned out, if translated into Russian, the name of the cruiser "Aurora".

Le Hong Fong briefly outlived his beloved. From the Saigon prison, he was transferred to the" island of death " Kondao. Hundreds of Vietnamese patriots languished on this gloomy island, lost in the waters of the South China Sea. He was placed in a damp earthen cage, where the rays of light did not penetrate. After several months of incarceration, he developed a short-lived consumption, and on September 6, 1942, he died. An unseen witness to his death was Zuong Bat Mai, who was kept in a nearby cage and became one of the leaders of the Vietnam-Soviet Friendship Society after the victory of the revolution. The dying man's last words were addressed to him: "Comrade, tell me that until his last breath, Le Hong Fong firmly believed that the hour of victory for our revolutionary cause would come."

Prophetic were the dying words of one of the prominent figures of the Vietnamese national liberation movement - only three years he did not live to see September 2, 1945, which today is the red day of the Vietnamese calendar - the Day of the declaration of independence of Vietnam.

THEY DEFENDED MOSCOW

In 1976, the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house offered me to write a non-fiction biographical book about Ho Chi Minh for the series "The Lives of Remarkable People". While searching for materials and studying the necessary literature, I accidentally came across a book of memoirs by Ivan Vinarov, a veteran of the Bulgarian labor movement. From it I learned that after the attack of Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union, in the days when the fate of Moscow was being decided, an International regiment was created from foreign representatives who worked in various organs of the Comintern, which became part of a Separate Special Purpose Motorized Rifle Brigade (OMSBON).

This brigade especially distinguished itself in the heavy battles near Moscow. Its defense line stretched from the northwestern part of the Moscow region all the way to the Bolshoi Theater in the center of Moscow. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya performed her feat in the ranks of this particular brigade. But the most surprising thing is that, according to Ivan Vinarov, among the German, Austrian, Spanish, Bulgarian anti-fascists who formed the backbone of the regiment, there were also six Vietnamese.

This phrase intrigued me so much that I decided to try to establish the names of these Vietnamese and find out their fate. However, the study of the lists of OMSBON personnel did not yield any results. There wasn't a single name that even looked Vietnamese. No photos of them were saved either. The surviving OMSBON veterans could not help either, as they considered all Asians to be citizens of the Central Asian republics.

In this impasse, I asked my late friend Nikolai Solntsev, who at that time was the head of the Broadcasting Department at the State TV and Radio Broadcasting of the USSR, to join the search. In one of the programs, employees of the department appealed to Vietnamese radio listeners with a request to provide any information about six unknown Vietnamese who participated in the defense of Moscow. And suddenly, from the museum" Nguetinye Soviets " (Vinh city) came the first ve-

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stochka: one of those who was in Moscow in 1941 and could have been part of an International Regiment is Yeong Thuk Tin, a fellow countryman of Ho Chi Minh, the son of his first school teacher.

A year later, a Soviet television crew went to Vietnam to work on a documentary about the Vietnamese Revolution. During the work on the film, we managed to find out the names of three more Vietnamese soldiers of the International Regiment: Vyong Thuk Thoay (underground name-Li Thuk Tat), Nguyen Sinh Than (Li Nam Thanh), Hoang Fan You (Li Anh Tao).

How did these Vietnamese end up in Moscow besieged by fascist hordes?

The answer to this question was unexpectedly found in the archive of the All-Union Pioneer Organization. In July 1926, its Central Council received a letter from Canton signed by Lee Thuy (one of Ho Chi Minh's party names): "Dear comrades, We have a small group of Vietnamese children here. Their age ranges from 12 to 15 years. Although they are still quite young, they have already experienced a lot of grief... We hope that you will not refuse to accept these Vietnamese teenagers to study."

Further searches revealed the following: 8 boys and girls, who came from families of underground revolutionaries, were engaged in political science courses in Canton. On the first day after their arrival in Canton, Ho Chi Minh gave them new names and a common surname of Lee, and from then on they were all considered" nephews " of Lee Thuy.

Thus, we can say with a high degree of confidence that when a positive response to Ho Chi Minh's letter came from Moscow in 1926, it was probably only boys, perhaps five people, who went. As for Yeong Thuk Tin, it turned out that he was accompanying these guys.

They traveled to Moscow for a long time-first by steamer from Shanghai to Vladivostok, then by train across Siberia. They studied in Moscow, then worked in youth organizations. Their new life was interrupted by the war. In the ranks of the International Regiment, apparently, somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow, messengers of distant Vietnam took their last fight. "Remember those who died in the battle for Moscow..." - these words from the famous song of the war years apply with full justification to these young Vietnamese fighters today.

Shortly after the Nguetitians ' involvement in the defense of Moscow became widely known in Vietnam, the Nyan Zan newspaper reported the name of another Vietnamese citizen who worked in a Moscow military hospital during the war - Lee Phu Shan. According to the newspaper, on the first day after the war began, he asked to be sent to the front, but due to poor health, he was assigned to work in a hospital. He celebrated Victory Day on May 9, 1945 in the Soviet Union, and was awarded the medal "For Valiant Labor in the Great Patriotic War". A decade later, Lee Fu Shan returned to his homeland and died in 1980 in Hanoi at the age of 80.

So, a long search, in which dozens of Russian and Vietnamese enthusiasts took an active part, made it possible to identify the names of five Vietnamese internationalists who participated in the defense of Moscow. Based on these data, the Society of Soviet-Vietnamese Friendship prepared a proposal to award all five of them with Soviet military orders.

On December 14, 1986, in the days of the 45th anniversary of the beginning of the Soviet counteroffensive and the defeat of the Nazis near Moscow, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued a Decree awarding (posthumously) five Vietnamese participants in the Battle for Moscow-Vyong Thuk Tinh, Li Thuk Tat, Li Nam Thanh, Li Anh Tao and Li Fu Shan with the Orders of the Patriotic War wars of the 1st degree.

THIS IS NEVER FORGOTTEN

Vietnam has enjoyed the fruits of independent, sovereign development for just over a year. The former colonialists returned to use military force to restore their lost dominance. In December 1946, a long war that lasted almost 8 years began, which in Vietnamese historiography was called the first war of resistance.

With the growing scale of this war, the Soviet Union found itself in a very difficult and delicate situation. One of the participants in the war was France, an ally of the USSR in the recent joint struggle against German fascism; the other was an ideological ally, one of those colonial countries whose liberation had been among the main goals of Soviet foreign policy for many previous years.

In 1968, I worked for the newspaper Pravda as a special correspondent for Indochina. The editor-in-chief at that time was M. V. Zimyanin, who in the mid-1950s was the USSR Ambassador to the DRV. When I had to "watch" on the fifth, international, page of the newspaper and in this connection often visit the office of the editor-in-chief, he always recalled his youth as an ambassador with great eagerness and undisguised nostalgia and discussed with me the Vietnamese realities. Once we touched upon the subject of the above-mentioned "delicate situation", and M. V. Zimyanin, in his characteristic figurative form, remarked that then the Soviet side had, in the end, to act in accordance with the well-known Leninist formula " Vladivostok is far away, but the city is ours!"

In January 1950, with the end of the War of resistance still four and a half years away, the Soviet Union issued a declaration of recognition of the DRV and established diplomatic relations with it. This action, taking into account that the PRC did the same, immediately rescued the young republic from deep political and diplomatic isolation, opened up opportunities to provide it with comprehensive assistance, especially with military equipment and small arms.

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In the decisive battle of the Dien Bien Phu War, Vietnamese troops first used the famous katyushas. According to eyewitnesses, soldiers of the French Foreign Legion, including many Germans who participated in the war of Hitler's Germany against the Soviet Union, shouted: "C'est le feu de Stalingrad!" - "This is Stalingrad fire!" they threw down their weapons and hid at the bottom of deep trenches.

On July 20, 1954, agreements were signed in Geneva to end the war and restore peace in Vietnam, guaranteeing its national independence and territorial integrity. However, the basis of these agreements turned out to be a hidden mine. Vietnam was temporarily divided into two parts by a demarcation line along the 17th parallel, on the condition that general democratic elections would be held throughout the country in two years ' time to reunify the country and determine the way forward. However, these articles of the Geneva Agreements were not implemented, as a result of which the North and South of Vietnam were divided for many years, began to exist as two separate states.

In September 1964, I came to work in Hanoi as a TASS correspondent. The last time I was here was four years ago, when I was studying at Hanoi University. Back then, the Vietnamese capital was a quiet, patriarchal city. In the morning, when it was still light, we were already awakened by the chanting shouts of the barkers-merchants. We lived in the center of the city, on a shady street, where each mansion had its own unique architecture that distinguished it from its neighbors. But what all these ancient buildings had in common was the red-tiled roofs, polished to a high gloss by heavy rains, and the green-tinted wooden shutters that gave rise to a literary image: Paris in the time of d'Artagnan.

However, this time Hanoi seemed completely different to me - wary, anxious. The air smelled strongly of the second resistance war's thunderstorm. Just a month ago, under the pretext of "provocative actions" by the DRV torpedo boats against ships of the US 7th Fleet located in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin, American aircraft launched a missile and bomb attack on the coastal regions of North Vietnam. Following that, the US Congress passed the so-called "Tonkin Resolution", which gave the president the right to freely use the armed forces to retaliate against North Vietnam as "retribution measures" for the actions of the guerrillas in South Vietnam.

Many of my fellow journalists, including myself, then felt that this was a kind of bluff, a show of force in order to frighten the leadership of the DRV. Especially as month after month passed, and the sky over North Vietnam remained clear. And suddenly, on February 7 and 8, 1965, American aircraft unexpectedly bombed two southern cities of the DRV - Donghoi and Khosa, as well as nearby villages.

Personally, as a direct eyewitness of the events, it is still a mystery to me why the US administration chose to launch an undeclared air war against the DRV precisely on these days, when a Soviet party and government delegation consisting of Chairman of the Council of Ministers A. N. Kosygin and Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Yu. V.Andropov was in Hanoi. Maybe Washington hoped to intimidate not only Hanoi, but also Moscow?

Be that as it may, but the result, of course, turned out to be completely the opposite. According to Soviet participants in the Hanoi talks, A. N. Kosygin was outraged by the actions of the American side, which pointedly ignored the presence of the head of government of the second superpower in Hanoi, and strongly advocated providing the maximum possible assistance to the DRV. This position was clearly expressed the very next day in a statement of the Soviet Government, and on February 10 it was repeated in a joint statement of the Governments of the DRV and the USSR.

In record time, the People's Army of Vietnam was equipped with modern Soviet weapons: anti-aircraft missiles, anti-aircraft artillery, fighter aircraft and other types of military equipment. Our country sent military specialists to the DRV, who were engaged in the assembly and adjustment of military equipment on the spot. In a short time, thousands of Vietnamese have mastered modern types of anti-aircraft missile technology and confidently engaged in battle with enemy aircraft. Soviet military schools accepted a large number of young Vietnamese cadets who were trained in accelerated programs and sent to newly formed air force squadrons.

Relying on the selfless help of our country, the Vietnamese political and military leadership gradually managed to turn North Vietnam into a truly impregnable fortress, which was unsuccessfully stormed for almost a decade by first-class aircraft and ships of the US 7th Military Fleet. Created in the DRV, a highly effective national air defense system equipped with modern weapons and technical means was later evaluated by American generals as one of the most powerful air defense systems that ever took place in the history of wars.

The process of establishing the DRV air defense system was easily traced by how the tactics of American aviation changed. I experienced my very first air raid on the third day of the war in the city of Dong Hoi. We had 9 foreign journalists - from the Soviet Union, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and France. In the middle of the day, when we were having a quiet lunch in the restaurant of a local hotel, an air raid siren suddenly wailed. From the Gulf of Tonkin, where the ships of the US 7th Fleet dropped anchor, four American planes appeared one after another to the monotonous hum of engines. They were moving slowly, in a battle formation, and so low that you could see on their faces that they were almost invisible.

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wing plates and identification marks. From time to time, planes swooped down and rained fire on small boats and thatched huts on the other side of the Nyatle River that divides the city.

From February to August 1965, on the instructions of the TASS editorial board, I visited Zone 4 more than once-it included areas located south of Hanoi. It was these areas that became the main targets of bombing in the first months of the war. I remember the sleepless days and nights spent in the city of Vina. The radio almost continuously announces an air alert. Groups of fighter-bombers, replacing each other, constantly circle over the city at a high altitude, out of reach of anti-aircraft batteries. After waiting for a convenient moment or choosing any moving target on the road, they dive down. After being bombed out, they gain altitude again or go towards the bay. So it went on all the daylight hours when we were in the city.

And in August 1965, the US military had to dramatically change its usual tactics - the Vietnamese first divisions of surface-to-air missiles entered combat positions. Planes, accustomed to impunity at high altitudes, have become easy prey for missiles. I was told by a Vietnamese missile pilot I knew, Major Le Dong, that there were even days when some divisions managed the seemingly impossible task of shooting down two enemy planes with one missile.

Soviet anti-aircraft missiles were affectionately called" fire-breathing dragons " by the Vietnamese. Since the creation of the missile forces in the DRV, rocket scientists have become the most popular people in the country. Wherever the missile division appeared, the surrounding residents surrounded the fighters with warmth and care. They voluntarily dug trenches and parapets, masked rocket positions with bunches of banana leaves. And when the rocket soared into the sky and caught up with another Phantom, Vietnamese peasants proudly exclaimed: "Ten lua ta do!" - " Here they are, our missiles!"

THREE "NOT THE HOTTEST" DAYS

May is the hottest month in Hanoi. At noon, even in the shade, the mercury column rarely falls below 35 degrees. To this is added an extremely high humidity of the air. When you breathe, you almost physically feel as if instead of life-giving air, heavy, thick moisture is pouring into your lungs.

In 1967, this month was doubly hot for Hanoi residents - American aviation began systematic raids on the capital and its suburbs. In my diaries, a special place was occupied by three "not the hottest days" - May 19, 20 and 21, when the incessant bombing, sweltering heat and an incredibly large amount of journalistic work mixed in a kind of violent maelstrom.

Day one. The morning sky is covered with gloomy clouds, drizzling "mya fun" - fine, like water dust, rain. The atmosphere is surprisingly calm. The speaker that I installed on the balcony of my office, which has been working hard for the last few days, is silent. It was sent at my request from Moscow. Employees of the TASS economic department did their best. They got not just a speaker, but a super-powerful loudspeaker - one of those that we had hung on poles during the war. It makes such sounds that the windows shake, and you can hear it even in the neighboring streets.

But now, with the appearance of this "screamer", I am aware of the main events taking place in the city. The Air Defense Committee regularly reports on the location of American planes, where the raids took place, how many planes were shot down, etc.Along with me, residents of neighboring houses listen to radio messages, who gather in groups under the balcony of the building after lights out. Every time they report the number of planes shot down, they smile happily and, thinking that I didn't understand how many, proudly show me the number on their fingers.

Today the loudspeaker is silent, apparently, you can relax. But everything changed in a matter of seconds. Suddenly, four fighter-bombers appeared in the southwest, and at the same time an unprecedented missile salvo thundered, which scattered their battle formations. Then there were two powerful explosions, either bombs or rockets, from the direction of Chang Fu Street, where the foreign embassies are located. It's only a few minutes later when the wail of an air raid siren hits my ears.

I grab my helmet and camera and run to the explosion site, where people are already rushing from different directions. A soldier explains that it was a shrike rocket that exploded. From the rubble of tree branches, the bodies of three dead Vietnamese are removed. They were sitting in the trenches dug along the street, and did not have time, or perhaps forgot, to cover the top with concrete covers that lie next to the shelters, absorbed in the picture of the battle.

Two hours pass. Information about this morning's events is ready, and I'm waiting to get in touch with Moscow. And at this time, my "screamer" again breaks out with a sharp wail of a siren. Over Lake Chukbat, where the city's power plant is located, a huge yellow column of smoke and dust suddenly rises into the sky. From time to time, the silver cigars of airplanes come out of this pillar, and bombs explode again. The column of smoke grows before our eyes, covering almost half the sky.

Once again, as always, without twilight, night fell on the city. And, as if in a hurry to calm the residents, lanterns flashed on the wounded streets, the windows of cafes and pubs on the shores of lakes lit up invitingly. The radio is already reporting that seven enemy planes have been shot down over Hanoi. This figure, repeated hundreds of times, written in colored crayons, black ink, or even lime, appears on the walls of houses, on the sides of trucks. The city rejoices that it has come out of a new dangerous battle with air raiders with honor. But the joy of victory goes hand in hand with grief. Ambulances continuously drive up to the gates of hospitals, from which they unload-

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the wounded are being squeezed. Bicycle rickshaws with funeral wreaths of flowers are already scurrying through the streets.

Day two. It was finally Sunday. It's time to recover from yesterday. But from early in the morning, a warning voice of the announcer sounds from the speaker every now and then: "Compatriots, attention! Enemy planes are thirty kilometers away from the city!"

One air alert succeeds another. False alarms, but they keep people on their toes. As the captured pilots testified, it was allegedly decided not to give the Hanoi people rest day or night, and to be especially active between eleven and three o'clock in the afternoon. These hours, called siestas in the tropics, are usually reserved for afternoon naps, especially in summer when the heat is at its peak. It is no coincidence that many of my Vietnamese friends, as well as myself, one of the main impressions of these May days was the feeling of chronic lack of sleep.

Despite the day off, my constant helpers - the house manager Hai and the driver Nam-are busy in the yard with shovels, putting the bomb shelter in order. Built recently on their initiative, it bears very little resemblance to a bomb shelter. This is a squat brick house, sunk into the ground about a meter and a half. It is hardly possible to escape from a direct hit in it, but it still calms the nerves. It's only been two months since the shelter was built, and it's already overgrown with thick grass. There was even a banana tree growing on the roof, next to the ventilation pipe.

Today, I am especially looking forward to the end of the "gio cao diem" - rush hour (as they called the time of the most active aviation operations at that time). The press department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs called and said that in the afternoon a visit to the exhibition of American weapons used in the air war against the DRV would be organized. It turns out that you don't have to go far - the exhibition is located in the center of Hanoi, in a long wooden barrack of some military department.

Directly on the floor or on hastily equipped racks are bombs and missiles of various types and shapes, which for one reason or another did not explode. There is also a one - and-a-half-ton high-explosive monster-a huge crater from such a bomb I saw recently in the Hanoi suburb of Zyalam. And time bombs of various calibers. And air-to-ground missiles - "shrikes" and "bulpaps". And a lot of charred napalm cans - you can say, the only" substandard " exhibit at this exhibition.

A special place on the shelves is reserved for one-and-a-half-meter containers, resembling the shape of a corn cob, with spherical ball bombs. Especially because ball bombs are a completely new type of weapon, which the history of wars has not yet known. According to Defense Department spokesman Major Dang Ai, U.S. military factories began producing them in February 1965 specifically for the Vietnam War. A container containing from five hundred to six hundred and forty bombs of the same size-

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noah is the size of an orange, opens at a high altitude and scatters these "oranges", filled with three hundred small steel balls, over a rectangle a thousand meters long and two hundred meters wide.

As a parting gift, I asked the exhibition manager for one spherical bomb, and in addition to it, a "first-generation" ball bomb-in the shape of a pineapple with stabilizing plumage. Both of these bombs, along with a rather massive piece of shrike I found somewhere in a field near Vinh, I later took away with me, and they are still stored in my closet at home as a memento of my years spent in the Vietnam War.

Day three. As soon as I wake up, out of habit, I lean out of the window to see what the anti-aircraft gunners who have settled on the roof of the next house are doing. They are already wearing metal helmets and twirling something in a twin anti-aircraft machine gun. It looks like it's going to be a rough day again. The behavior of these guys, who couldn't have been more than eighteen, gave a fairly accurate indication of what was coming in the next few hours.

A few seconds later, the speaker began to rumble, and almost immediately there was a growing hum of jet engines. Taking the stairs two at a time, I swing my camera up to the roof. Planes, lying on the wing, at high speed fly low over the city center. Suddenly, over the Western Lake, about five hundred meters from the presidential Palace, along with the wreckage of the plane that collapsed in the air, parachute points with red domes appear. First one, then two, then three - parachutes, as if in slow motion, calmly, smoothly land behind the roofs of houses. If it hadn't been for the monstrous cannonade and the smoke and burning columns over the city, it might have occurred to me that I was witnessing a paratrooper contest.

One fighter-bomber "F-105D", not having time, apparently, to get rid of the bomb load, suddenly began to smoke thickly, began to glide over Badinh Square and crashed in an alley near the Hangdei Stadium. The crash was accompanied by an explosion of such force that even in the windows of the office, facing in that direction, glass flew out.

As soon as the cannonade stopped, people rushed to the crash site. Vietnamese people are naturally curious, and this was the first American plane to go down in the heart of Hanoi. I struggled through the crowd held back by the militia. The plane crashed into a truck, from which barrels of fuel oil were recently removed. The barrels rest ominously next to the truck, just a few meters away from the plane engulfed in flames. The danger is also hidden in the belly of the aircraft, where there may be unused ammunition.

Finally, a white jet of fire-extinguishing mixture hits the burning plane. Arrived firefighters and girls in black jackets militia almost bare hands pull away the red-hot barrels and flaming wreckage of the plane. I shoot frame after frame, hot tar spills under my feet, it seems that they are shouting something, but the meaning does not reach my consciousness. Fortunately, the tape ends, and the fireman's cry of " Run away!Run away! Run away! Run away! Run away! Run away! Run away! Run away! Run away! Run away! Run away! Run away! Run away! It's going to explode!"

When I got home, I spent half an hour shouting information about the events of the previous morning to the TASS stenographer on the phone in a "brutal" voice that resonates through the narrow and short street of Khao Ba Kuat. After getting pretty desperate and almost losing my voice, I finally finished the program and suddenly felt unbearably hot. Did they really finish off the power plant? Only when you live in the tropics can you fully understand the huge role that electricity plays in our lives. Neither the air conditioner nor the four-blade hair dryer under the ceiling worked, the refrigerator "ran". There was nothing to wash with, as the water was supplied to the house by a miniature pump, also powered by electricity. I was sweating profusely, and I sat there stupidly wondering how my neighbors, the anti-aircraft gunners, could stand this heat in the sun, with their hot machine guns.

After lunch, together with the correspondent of the newspaper "Pravda" Alexey Vasiliev, we drive my battered Moskvich-203 to the power plant area. Along the Alley of Youth - a wide dam that separates two lakes - Zapadnoye and Chukbat, there are new ZPU's. Anti-aircraft gunners sit on the ground, spreading oilcloth mats, and eat their simple lunch: sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves, fried bananas. At this time, we see people running on both sides of the car - again an air alert. Extraneous sounds are drowned out by the hum of the engine, which makes what is happening around you look like a scene from a silent movie. It takes what feels like an eternity for me to turn the car around on the narrow, three-meter-wide road.

We rush at breakneck speed past the National Park building-

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braniya. The sentry shouts something after us, apparently demanding to stop, but we rush to the diplomatic quarter. A crazy thought flashes through my head: someone said that if during an air raid a car that does not have a special pass does not stop on command, then the sentry has the right to open fire to kill. Thank God, the Moskvich finally rolls into the long-awaited alley with a terrible whine of brakes, and we run into the roof of our military attache's house.

In the sky, the picture is the same as in the morning. The AD-6 planes are again heading for the power plant area, coming from the south, apparently from the Kittyhawk aircraft carrier, which recently appeared in the Gulf of Tonkin. Once again, a giant column of smoke rises in the area of the power plant. Planes almost do not dive on the object, as before, and, before reaching it for three or four kilometers, they fire rockets.

Immediately after dark, people poured into the streets of the city with banners: "Glory to the army and the population of Hanoi, who shot down nine enemy planes today!". If this is the case, then in just two days the Americans lost 16 combat vehicles over Hanoi. Have they achieved much? It seems that one goal of the raids was achieved - the power plant was disabled. But, as it turned out later, only for one day. The very next morning, electricity was restored to homes. 16 planes, the same number of first-class pilots, who spent a lot of money on training. Did the Pentagon's dubious "retaliation strikes" cost too much?..

* * *

In recent years, I have been to Vietnam more than once on business trips. Every time I see a new special industrial zone, of which there are already about two dozen in Vietnam today, or another skyscraper made of concrete, steel and glass that literally grew up on the site of Bidonville, I immediately remember the early morning of July 17, 1966 in front-line Hanoi. On this day, the President of the DRV made a traditional address to the people on the radio. The air above the city still smelled smoky from the fires of another American air raid. Ho Chi Minh spoke in his usual calm, hollow voice:

"The war may last for another five, ten, twenty years, or even longer. Hanoi, Haiphong and other cities and industrial enterprises may be destroyed. However, the Vietnamese people cannot be intimidated. There is nothing more precious than independence and freedom! The day of victory will come, and our people will restore their homeland, make it even more majestic and beautiful.

It seems that even an optimist like Ho Chi Minh could not have imagined what his homeland would really be like after the victorious end of the second war of resistance. Today, Vietnam is one of the most politically stable states in Southeast Asia and a leading member of the largest regional political and economic organization-ASEAN. Thanks to the dynamic development of the economy, which, since 1990, for more than a decade ensured the growth of gross domestic product at the level of 7-8% per year, Vietnam, figuratively speaking, doubled. This is one of the most impressive achievements of the" renewal policy", proclaimed by the leadership of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1987 and opened the way for the construction of"market socialism".

During these trips, I naturally have many meetings with representatives of the new generation - by analogy with our reality, they can be called "new Vietnamese" - entrepreneurs, managers, bankers. It is amazing that even these people, seemingly far from politics and ideology, in an informal atmosphere of a friendly feast, always remember the significant contribution of our country to the victories of the Vietnamese people and make heartfelt toasts to the Vietnamese-Russian friendship and cooperation.

Once, in the South Vietnamese province of Dong Nai, I met a senior official of the Provincial People's Committee, Chin Ngoc Yok. It was on the eve of another anniversary of the liberation of South Vietnam, and he invited me to a traditional meeting with his military friends. It was warm and homey, and it had lasted late. Former partisans, replacing each other, shared memories of the most memorable events of their fighting youth. About how confident they were in battle, because, unlike the enemy, they had a miracle weapon in their hands-Kalashnikov assault rifles. About how in March 1975, the enemy's defense instantly burst at the seams when two divisions of T-54 tanks broke through to the Tainguyen Plateau and cut the South of Vietnam in two. About how short - lived the final operation to liberate Saigon was after this powerful blow - just three days.

At this veterans ' meeting, I heard amazing details about my new friend, who, as it turned out, had been fighting in a partisan unit in his native province for almost a decade. On April 30, 1975, holding an AK-47 assault rifle and wearing the black homespun peasant garb then worn by South Vietnamese guerrillas, he sat with a death grip on the turret bracket of the T-54 tank that was the first to break into the former Presidential Palace in Saigon.

So, according to my new acquaintances, the fall of the hated puppet regime took place that day, which was the final point of the long-term struggle for the liberation of South Vietnam and the reunification of the country. Today, the legendary T-54 tank can be seen in the Museum of the People's Army of Vietnam in the center of the former Saigon-now Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnam veterans see it not only as a symbol of the historic victory of their people in the long, full of victims and hardships, the second war of resistance. But also as the memory of the military brotherhood of our two peoples, which is not erased by the inexorable passage of time.

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