On August 13, 1969, the PRC, feeling that in order to put Moscow in its place, Beijing would also support Western countries, launched a new provocation on the border with the USSR. In terms of scale, it was almost on a par with Damansky and even surpassed Damansky-2 - a collision near Goldinsky Island (for more details, see "VO" here).
This time, the Chinese have chosen a rather remote corner - in the East Kazakhstan area near Lake Zhalanashkol. On the morning of August 13, only fifteen Chinese soldiers crossed the Soviet border at the Zhalanashkol outpost. By 7 o'clock in the morning they began demonstratively digging in. But beyond the border line, about a hundred Chinese have already accumulated. The Soviet border guards did not want to shed blood. But they did not react to all the warnings from the other side …
Soon, another 12 Chinese soldiers violated the border and moved along the control strip to Kamennaya Hill. On two armored personnel carriers, ours cut their path, but after short negotiations, the Chinese soldiers opened fire from machine guns. The Soviet border guards actually had to answer.
Armed with small arms and anti-tank weapons, the Chinese continued to cross the border, occupying one of the hills. Border guards on three armored personnel carriers entered into battle with them. Under the command of senior lieutenant Olshevsky, a group of eight fighters, supported by two armored personnel carriers, went behind the Chinese lines, and they took up a perimeter defense.
Altitude Pravaya 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 pelted with grenades. Another Soviet border guard, Private V. Ryazanov, was mortally wounded. By 9 o'clock, the height was repulsed, and the Chinese no longer planned attacks.
There were many weapons on the battlefield, mostly Soviet-made in 1967-69. with markings of Romania and North Korea. This provocation cost Beijing more than 50 killed and wounded, the USSR - 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 against the USSR in this remote section of the border.
Such allies, such friends
It is now well known that since April 1969, shortly after the battle on Damansky Island, the re-export of Soviet small arms to China by Romania and the DPRK began to grow. By mid-August 1969, shortly after the conflict, these shipments had nearly doubled their level in the fall of 1968. It was then, after the completion 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, together with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, paid official visits first to Pakistani Lahore and then to Bucharest. At the same time, Romania and Pakistan agreed to mediate in establishing Sino-American contacts at the highest level, and intelligence equipment from the United States began to flow to the PRC through Pakistan.
Meanwhile, on September 11, 1969, a meeting was already scheduled at the Beijing airport between the USSR and the PRC prime ministers, Alexei Kosygin and Zhou Enlai. First of all, the border issue was on its agenda. The Chinese side, it seems, decided ahead of time, through a new show of force, to strengthen its positions.
However, they did not cancel the meeting at the Beijing airport, and there both sides agreed to resolve controversial issues first on the mutual Siberian-Far Eastern border. But, as you know, since 1970, all of them, as a rule, were decided in favor of the PRC. In Beijing then they realized that the issue would be resolved in the same way for a plot of almost 400 sq. km by the lake Zhalanashkol. And they did not particularly pedal this question afterwards.
Much later, according to the Kazakh-Chinese agreement in Alma-Ata of July 4, 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 60s, Moscow realized that the PRC enjoyed the quite substantive support of a number of Soviet allies, more precisely, supposedly allies. In Romania, for example, at that time official and very active criticism of the above-mentioned Operation Danube continued, and in the DPRK - albeit unofficially, criticism of Khrushchev's anti-Stalinism and the same operation in Czechoslovakia.
But Moscow, for obvious political reasons, chose to refrain from putting 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 a military-political bloc of Romania not only with the then Stalinist-pro-Chinese Albania, but also with Tito's Yugoslavia. Let us remind you that socialist Yugoslavia then regularly obstructed the USSR on the world stage within the framework of the Non-Aligned Movement initiated by it at the suggestion of the West.
When Beijing was incessantly quarreling with Moscow, Washington and Islamabad were also "added" to Bucharest and Pyongyang as true friends of China. On August 1-2, Nixon and Kissinger met with the then head of Pakistan, General Yahya Khan, in Lahore. The main topic of the talks was options for "greater support for communist China while (as G. Kissinger said) Mao Zedong is alive."
At the same time, the operation of the transpakistan transport corridor, which also passed through the territory of the PRC, began to work regularly, along which products not only of a civilian profile, and not only from the United States, began to be shipped in greater 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, having met with the Chinese ambassador Liu Shenkuan, announced his desire to meet with the leaders of the PRC somewhere and support its "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, Ceausescu personally confirmed these initiatives to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in Beijing.
Fruitful mediation
The mediation of Bucharest and Islamabad bore fruit: Kissinger visited Beijing for the first time 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 is known, in February 1972, marking since then their more active cooperation in countering the USSR.
By the way, it is quite characteristic that such "lightning" visits of Nixon to Pakistan, and then, together with Kissinger, to Romania took place exactly on the eve of the conflict near Zhalanashkol … All these factors naturally influenced Moscow's restrained political reaction to this conflict. This is also confirmed by the fact that he was not mentioned in the central and regional Soviet media (except for a short message in the large circulation of the local border post).
But there were also internal factors of Soviet restraint. Firstly, up to the beginning of the 1980s, more than 50 underground Stalinist-Maoist groups were active in the USSR, initiated by Beijing and calling in their leaflets and brochures to "overthrow the rule of revisionist traitors to the great Lenin-Stalin cause" who planned sabotage and terrorist attacks. … Moreover, instead of neutralized such groups, new ones constantly arose. But after the resignation in late June 1981 of Hua Guofeng, Mao's Stalinist successor, Beijing's support for such groups has dwindled.
Secondly, a systemic social crisis was brewing in the USSR at the turn of the 60s and 70s. Moreover, Brezhnev and others like them saw the main reason for this in the fact that the notorious reforms of Kosygin (for more details see "VO" here) are leading the state in line with the growing social and material needs of the population. That could negatively affect the growth of the country's economy and the state of its defense capability.
It was precisely these assessments that Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, expressed at the plenum of the Central Committee in December 1968:
Yes, we must seriously satisfy the needs of the people, but where is the line to these needs? There is no such line. The party is doing everything possible to overfulfill the planned targets for increasing wages, and aspirations, requests, desires are growing here. … you need to think about what to do next, because we may find ourselves, if we do not find the right solution, in a difficult situation. … Moreover, the growth of wages outstrips the growth of labor productivity.
As you know, the Kosygin reforms were practically curtailed already in the early 70s. On the whole, numerous interrelated factors predetermined the impossibility for the USSR to get involved in a large-scale military conflict with the PRC. They also predetermined the repeated Soviet concessions to Beijing on border issues.
