Being a communist power, the Soviet Union lent moral, logistic, and military support to North Vietnam. The scale of aid can not be measured till today because there was much speculation about exactly what was given. However, Soviet support was vital to Hanoi and contributed to its success. In fact, the Soviet Union supplied Hanoi with information, technical advisors and moral support – but Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev preferred to limit his backing and keep his country at arm’s length from the unfolding trouble in Vietnam. After Krushchev’s death, the new soviet premier, Alexei Kosygin, arrived in Hanoi in February 1965 and signed a defence treaty that would provide North Vietnam with both financial aid and military equipment and advisors. According to some analysts, by the late 1960s, more than three quarters of the military and technical equipment received by North Vietnam was coming from the Soviet Union, it was supplied as aid, not loans. The USSR provided surface-to-air missiles that the Chinese weren’t yet technologically capable of producing. The Soviets even allegedly shot down some U.S. planes. Overall, though, they pumped only about 3,000 troops into the conflict.Finally, in 1975 North Vietnamese troops reunified the nation under communist rule, that would have been impossible without the support of the USSR.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/russians-vietnam-war.html
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1996-09-01/soviet-union-and-vietnam-war
https://alphahistory.com/vietnamwar/chinese-and-soviet-involvement/
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/china-and-soviet-union-recognize-democratic-republic-of-vietnam
The Vietnam War was a very interesting war because America couldn't do what it wanted to do. They could easily have blown Vietnam off the face of the Earth but since the North Vietnamese were allied with the Soviets the Americans didn't want to risk World War 3. Overall, these wars demonstrate that the superpowers were doing their absolute most to avoid nuclear annihilation.
ReplyDeleteBoth the Soviets and the Chinese provided aid including technical advisors and battlefield infrastructure to the North Vietnamese forces, but as you said in your post, we don’t know the extent of their backing. Reportedly, China, like the Soviet Union, unconditionally supported the North Vietnamese government by offering “blank cheques” for the constant supply of equipment being shipped through the Ho Chi Minh trail. China’s generosity influenced Ho Chi Minh’s government, and their advice influenced Hanoi’s programs of land reform and industrialisation. Inevitably, the Chinese communist ideology rubbed off on the Vietnamese. Hoang Van Hoan, the Viet Minh’s chief diplomat in China, even told a Chinese delegation that the Vietnamese revolution would follow the course of the Chinese revolution by relying on the “Mao Zedong Thought”.
ReplyDeletehttps://alphahistory.com/vietnamwar/chinese-and-soviet-involvement/