Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Russian Federation Candidate of Economic Sciences

US aggression in Vietnam Keywords:, bombing of Hanoi, Soviet-Chinese relations

It was the fourth year of the undeclared U.S. air war against North Vietnam. After the first raid on August 5, 1964, it escalated from February 7, 1965 into a massive bombing campaign of populated areas of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) aircraft of the US 7th Fleet.

American air raids continued with several interruptions and varying intensity until 1973.

OUR WEEKDAYS

The Hanoi Central Hospital, where I, the third secretary of the Soviet Embassy in the DRV, was stricken with jaundice in January 1968, was crowded with wounded members of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front's military operation that attacked the US Marine Corps base in the Khesan Valley, 25 km from the demilitarized zone.

I will not forget the lively, heart-touching stories about the past battles of these heroic young guys (the number of amputees was amazing), with whom I became friends during the weeks I spent in the hospital. This was the real truth about the war in the South of the country, unknown to me before and different from the official descriptions. Many such meetings were held under the roar of exploding bombs and anti-aircraft cannonade in the bomb shelter, where we were brought or transferred after the air alarm from different departments during frequent air raids.

The Red River Bridge located a few hundred meters from the hospital was a permanent target of US air strikes on Hanoi. Built in colonial times by the French architect Eiffel, the author of the tower named after him in Paris, this bridge has become truly legendary. Repeatedly destroyed, it was always restored by the heroic efforts of the Vietnamese and survived, remaining throughout the war a vital strategic artery through which everything necessary was supplied to the army in the South.

When the bridge could be put out of action, the traffic flow was directed through a pontoon crossing that was built at night just opposite the central hospital located near the shore (according to my interlocutors, this was done in order to protect the Red Cross painted on the roofs of hospital buildings). When air strikes were transferred to a temporary crossing, bombs and rockets hit the hospital more frequently.

They did not pass the diplomatic quarter in Hanoi, located about two kilometers in a straight line from the mentioned bridge. The buildings of the Embassies of Romania and Mongolia, as well as the trade missions of Bulgaria, were the first to be hit by air-to-ground missiles. Later, one of them tore up the corner of a residential building where our military attache lived and was at that time, who escaped with small cuts on his face. The air wave pushed the shutters of the window into the interior of my room in the adjacent house, and when I returned from work, I had to spend a long time shoveling out the broken glass that had scattered on it.

At the beginning of the year, with the intensification of air raids, we were given hard hats, bomb shelters were dug near the embassy building and residential buildings, and diesel engines were installed due to frequent power outages. At first, we reacted to this with the carefree and even bravado characteristic of youth.

Hard hats were worn when the windows of our offices facing the side of the mentioned bridge began to fall during the raids, and according to the instructions, we had to hide away from them in the corridor near the staircases. Outside the embassy and the eyes of the authorities, hard hats were practically not used at first.

If an air raid alarm caught them at night - this was happening more and more often - they rarely went down to the bomb shelter. As for me, I was woken up by the sound of bombs and anti-aircraft guns exploding (the sirens were usually delayed: American planes, starting mainly from aircraft carriers, flew up to Hanoi along the Red River at low altitudes, trying to avoid being hit by Soviet-made missiles), I remained lying under a mosquito net and, to protect myself from glass fragments, he groped in the dark for the helmet that had been prepared on the bed that night.

However, under the influence of the war situation, we, the young embassy staff, quickly grew up, realizing our responsibility to our parents who were worried about us, and families sent home. They no longer ran up to the roofs of residential buildings, as in the first days of the bombing, hearing the bangs of rocket explosions above their heads and applauding their hits and not paying attention to the shrapnel flying down.

I was also brought to my senses by the incident when I almost became a victim of the armed Vietnamese guards guarding our embassy. One morning, an air raid alarm caught me on my way to work near the embassy. When I was already at the entrance, quickening my pace and putting on my helmet, gunfire suddenly whizzed right over my head. This is a guard soldier, following the instructions, at the first sounds of the siren, jumped into the trench dug in front of the post (a small concrete well) and, without looking at it, jumped into the ground.

sides, emptied the clip on... a passing plane.

Most of the time had to be spent within the diplomatic quarter, movement around the city was restricted by the authorities, and entry to many metropolitan areas for vehicles with diplomatic plates was strictly prohibited.

A kind of outlet for us were several major Vietnamese holidays of the year, during which a moratorium on air raids was declared (from a few days to a week). In these short intervals between bombardments, trying to cover as many remote areas of the north of the country as possible, in order to first assess the state of economic facilities built with the help of the Soviet Union, we climbed on our native "goats" along broken roads far to the South up to the demarcation line.

We usually returned to Hanoi right before the end of the moratorium, rushing to catch up to 12 o'clock in the morning. Endless columns of trucks and fuel trucks were moving south at night to meet us.

Vietnam of that wartime period, being at the epicenter of world attention, attracted both international journalists and cameramen, as well as famous writers, artists and poets from Moscow. Their arrival in Hanoi was a real event for us. Providing them as experts in the local language and reality with various assistance, they vied with each other to invite them to visit, listening to stories during long feasts.

I remember meeting Julian Semyonov at my house on the eve of his flight to Moscow. He talked enthusiastically about the discoveries he had made as he reviewed the documents of the closed archives, shared his plans for his new books. He explained the purpose of coming to Vietnam as a long-standing idea to write a spy novel, for which he decided to visit the places described by G. Green in "The Quiet American". Yu was leaving. Semyonov was disappointed: all attempts to get permission to travel to Saigon, including through observers of the international control commission (it included Poles, Indians and Canadians), who constantly plied between the capitals of the two parts of Vietnam separated by the demarcation line, failed. He had to be satisfied with visiting the restaurant and bar in the hotel "Metropol", which became famous thanks to the aforementioned novel, and then had a new name.

I still remember the talented honest reports of the Pravda war correspondent Alexey Vasiliev. They were included in his book "Rockets under the Lotus Flower", in which he gave an objective picture of life and war in those dramatic years.

I remember meeting Ilya Glazunov, who returned from a trip around the country with numerous paintings, among which portraits of ordinary Vietnamese workers stood out (some of them can still be seen in the Volkhonka Museum). The exhibition was a success with the Vietnamese and received a good press in our country.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko's visit, meetings with him in Hanoi and a year later at the Embassy of the DRV in Moscow, when he was at the peak of popularity among the Vietnamese for his anti-war poetry cycle, left a mark on my memory.

DEMONSTRATIVE CARE

For security reasons, the number of protocol events during those war years was kept to a minimum.

However, the embassies tried to hold annual receptions on the occasion of their national holidays regularly, as in peacetime. For this purpose, a spacious hall of the Diplomatic Club was usually rented from the local Foreign Ministry.

In 1968, in the last days before October 1, when the Chinese Embassy usually held a reception on the occasion of its national holiday, the Soviet embassy in Hanoi was held in tense anticipation.

The campaign of criticism of the course of the USSR and the CPSU, launched in China under the banner of the "cultural revolution", which was gaining momentum at that time, and the sharp controversy that arose on ideological grounds continued to cool the atmosphere of our previously friendly relations with colleagues from the Chinese embassy, bringing them more and more mutual wariness and distrust.

Such sentiments were reinforced by personal observations. Like other diplomats of our embassy who had been at home on vacation (the only "established" route at that time was through China, with an overnight stay in Beijing), I had vivid images of our stay there for a long time (initially we stayed overnight in the embassy's residential complex, but after its siege in January 1967, we were put up in the embassy's Beijing International Airport hotel). At the capital's airport, right up to the boarding gate, we were invariably chased literally on the heels of bullying-minded groups of Red Guards with banners "Down with the Soviet revisionists!" in their hands, shouting "incriminating" slogans to the sound of drums.

No less memorable are the picturesque episodes associated with long-hour flights from Hanoi to Beijing and back with two landings on an IL-14 plane of a Chinese airline.

After take-off and climb, the same ritual was repeated: two flight attendants on both sides of the narrow aisle of the cabin, while passengers eagerly looked in the direction from which the smells of fragrant Chinese cuisine tickled their nostrils, demonstrated a hitherto unknown folklore genre. They sang and danced quotes from the great helmsman to the bravura melodies with red books in their hands. Only after the distribution of red books with his sayings in foreign languages and various-sized icons with the image of Mao's profile, the long-awaited treat finally followed. During all the flights, I have collected a fair collection of them, reminding me of the non-virtuality of what I saw and experienced in those not so distant years. (Since 1969, in order to avoid incidents, our citizens began to fly to Moscow on a new route, bypassing China, via India.)

In Hanoi, our contacts with our Chinese colleagues practically stopped at that time, bilateral events were no longer held, and we met with them, both of us trying to avoid public relations.-

only at official receptions hosted by the Vietnamese side or embassies of third countries accredited here. There were, however, minor skirmishes on several occasions, when the Soviet and Chinese ambassadors inadvertently bumped into each other and exchanged diplomatic barbs.

On the eve of the Chinese reception, we received a response from Moscow to a request regarding our participation in it. At that time, it was unprecedented, although not completely unexpected for us. It was ordered to send a second person of the embassy to it and, in case of direct attacks from the Chinese side against the Soviet Union, leave the reception in protest. Adviser X, who summoned me, gave me, at that time the third secretary of the Embassy, instructions from the Ambassador to accompany him to this event as an interpreter from the Vietnamese language.

We were among the first to arrive at the reception. They walked around the still-empty hall with tense faces. He carefully read the banners and slogans hanging on the walls, translating their contents to the adviser. They did not find anything unexpected in them: they used their usual cliches to brand modern revisionists who were accused of aiding world imperialism, etc.When they found no mention of our country, they decided to stay and wait for the speech of the Chinese ambassador.

As time passed, the familiar Chinese tunes began and ended for the umpteenth time, and the beginning of the reception dragged on. The main guests were expected. Finally, with a noticeable delay (never before has the Vietnamese side allowed itself to show such obvious disrespect for its main ally and donor), Vietnamese party and state leaders entered the hall and stood in order at a long table for honorary guests.

The Chinese ambassador came up to the podium set up right next to the main table and prepared to read a speech, and behind him, the embassy's translator in Vietnamese, who was familiar to me, stood at the microphone. To hear better, my adviser and I moved closer to the first row of reception guests standing in front of the main table.

After addressing the guests in Chinese, the ambassador paused, and an interpreter stepped in, beginning to read out paragraphs of what he had prepared. Listening intently to his fluent speech, I tried not to miss the most important part...

Starting with an assessment of the international situation, the ambassador immediately moved on to stencil attacks on modern revisionists and suddenly (in my head flashed: "Did you mishear?!") branded the Soviet revisionists, accusing them of trying to impose their will on the countries of the "third world" and added something else in the same spirit.

Mindful of the instructions I'd received, I leaned over to Advisor X. I translated what I'd heard.

"Let's go!" After what seemed like a moment's hesitation, he responded. We made our way to the exit, everyone watching intently. He had to walk across the room, along the main table, along a narrow passageway that separated him from the main group of guests. He caught a glimpse of the familiar faces of the tall Vietnamese guests, their oriental expressions unreadable.

No sooner had we left the hall and entered the adjoining room, which in bad weather served as a dressing room, than I heard impatient voices behind me. I turned around, startled. A large group of diplomats stood behind me. Following us, diplomats from all Eastern European socialist countries, with the exception of Romania, left the reception.

They formed a tight circle around me and kept repeating the same question: "What did he say?" It turned out that none of them at the reception was fluent in Vietnamese. (Most of the diplomatic corps managed to speak French and English, and a few Vietnamese-speaking diplomats at that time returned home after completing their business trips or were on vacation.) " Soviet revisionists...", - I repeated in response to the phrase that I remembered less and less confidently. Some of them recorded it. Everyone quickly dispersed, hurrying to "unsubscribe" to their respective capitals as soon as possible.

We went outside with Councilor X. "Report to the ambassador, he is waiting in his office," he said, saying goodbye. Repeating to himself the cherished phrase that was to be conveyed to the ambassador, I quietly found myself at the gates of the embassy located nearby in the same block. I saw a light in his office on the second floor, probably the only one in the whole building that was on at this late hour.

"Write down what was said in the speech and about the slogans in the audience. I'll notify Moscow myself, " he said shortly, without taking his head off the pile of papers on his desk. Having completed the assignment, he handed the written sheet to the ambassador. "You are dismissed," was all he said as he said good-bye, in his usual reserved manner.

After returning home from the embassy, I spent the rest of the evening and part of the night thinking about the vicissitudes of my diplomatic career. In the middle of the night, my half-asleep imagination conjured up images of an impending encounter with Moscow. Pushing away his unhappy thoughts, he consoled himself with the unexpected opportunity to see his parents.

The next morning at the embassy, I began by gathering information about what had happened the day before at the diplomatic club. I listened intently to the news broadcasts of radio stations broadcasting mainly from Saigon to Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and scanned the radio intercept pages in French (short excerpts from Western news agencies sent out by the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry at that time). Of course, they did not miss the opportunity to savor - and not without some malice-yesterday's incident, providing correspondence from Hanoi with catchy headlines: "Diplomatic scandal in Hanoi", "Sensational incident at a Chinese reception", "For the first time in the diplomatic practice of Hanoi", etc.

Only at the end of the working day, when I managed to get the full text of that memorable speech, did I finally breathe a sigh of relief. It was a direct criticism of the Soviet Union not only at the beginning of the text, but also repeated later, when we had already left the Chinese reception in protest.

A LAKE WHERE A SOVIET AMBASSADOR AND A FUTURE US SENATOR COULD MEET

Despite a certain dryness of tone in relations with subordinates, acquired, probably, over the long years of his administrative career in the Central Committee of the CPSU, Ilya Sergeevich Shcherbakov, transferred to the embassy post from Beijing, where he briefly worked as an adviser-envoy, enjoyed constant respect among young diplomats.

Not least for his fatherly understanding and concern for our needs. Apparently, with a discount on wartime and our family-free situation, he often forgave us for minor pranks and not very serious deviations from discipline, while appreciating and encouraging us for successful work. A workaholic and ascetic in everyday life, he was completely devoid of swagger, which bribed us and distinguished him from some other bosses of such a high rank known to us.

Having spent almost ten years in Hanoi in this position, most of them in the conditions of air raids, he allowed himself only one hobby.

Once a week on Sundays, when there was a short pause in air raids, regardless of the weather, he would go early in the morning with a driver to Ho Tay Lake (West Lake), located almost in the center of the city and fish there until lunch with a fishing rod. Only an air raid could disrupt this unshakable routine or speed up his return to the embassy. (Throughout the long war years, this hobby of the ambassador remained a headache for the embassy staff responsible for ensuring his security. Unable to stop the ambassador from going to the lake, they spent the hours of his absence from the embassy waiting anxiously at their workplace.)

By an incredible coincidence, on October 26, 1967, the same Ho Tay Lake (this happened on Thursday, when the ambassador was not on a fishing trip), a US Air Force lieutenant, now a senator and former Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, parachuted out of a crashed plane. Flying out that day from an aircraft carrier to bomb a thermal power plant in central Hanoi, it was shot down by a Soviet-made missile. This incident then made a lot of noise: a lot of people ran to the place of the American pilot's abduction, and only thanks to the intervention of the military (they were the first to reach the place and capture the prisoner), lynching was prevented.

TROPHY HUNTERS

Following the Vietnamese military, Soviet and Chinese military specialists rushed to the lake.

The fact is that during the air war against the DRV, the Americans widely used Vietnamese territory as a testing ground for the latest models of military equipment and weapons. The planes shot down over Vietnam, which had just entered service with the US Army, and their missile and bomb weapons could not but become the object of increased attention from not only local, but also foreign military specialists. Among them, the greatest activity (and opportunities) were distinguished by Chinese and Soviet ones.

I must say that our great eastern neighbor even then showed a special interest in new missile and other military technologies. Our military experts attributed this to the increasing number of cases of missing Soviet air defense missiles delivered to Vietnam from containers during transportation through Chinese territory. (After the US Navy's 7th Fleet blockaded the seaports of the DRV, Soviet military equipment was transported by rail through China.)

The scant details of the work of our military-technical specialists became known to us, young diplomats who were not privy to this then-closed area, from songs and communication with their authors - our peers, whom we called trophy hunters among ourselves.

In those years, military-themed songs were very popular among young diplomats of the embassy and employees of our other institutions. Especially songs based on the poems of the talented young poet Valery Kuplevakhsky from the group of trophy hunters. His songs were invariably played at all our gatherings, we memorized them, copied them on each other's tape recorders. They were filled with a piercing nostalgia for the Motherland, a dream of a quick meeting with relatives and loved ones. From them, we learned some details of the risk-taking work of these cute young guys in difficult local conditions. One of the songs described how our specialists, "racing" with the Chinese, waded through the jungles and swamps of rice fields to the fallen American planes or rockets that did not explode, trying to be the first.

A verse of one of V. Kuplevakhsky's songs, addressed to his beloved, still keeps the memory.:

  
 
 At six o'clock in the evening 
 after the war 
 You're on a date with me
come, 
 On Arbatskaya Square for you 
 I'll be waiting 
 Shard of EF one hundred and five* 
 keep it under your arm." 
 
 
 

Unfortunately, the brave and risky military work of our military-technical specialists, who performed their duty with honor in the warring Vietnam, turned out to be somehow forgotten. As, however, and our rocket scientists and pilots. This, of course, was facilitated by a certain veil of secrecy. But it has long been removed.

* * *

These are just a few episodes of working in Hanoi during the U.S. Vietnam War. Although, of course, they cannot convey the drama of that difficult time.

* F-105 (F-105) - at that time the newest American fighter.

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