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BOX-FOLDER-REPORT: 93-4-125
TITLE:             Moscow's Exploitation of the Damansky Skirhish
BY:                r.r.g.
DATE:              1969-3-12
COUNTRY:           Soviet Union
ORIGINAL SUBJECT:  Sino-Soviet Rift

--- Begin ---

RADIO FREE EUROPE Research

COMMUNIST AREA

USSR: Sino-Soviet Rift
12 March 1969

MOSCOW'S EXPLOITATION OF THE DAMANSKY
SKIRMISH

On Sunday, 2nd March, the most serious border incident
between two superpowers since World War II took place on
Damansky Island in the Ussuri River. For the first time in
the history of the Sino-Soviet conflict it was officially
announced by both sides that there had been dead and wounded
among the troops involved. The potential for escalation
is almost unlimited, since both countries have the
thermonuclear weapons available to them, but until now such escalation
as has taken place has been confined to the political plane,
with the armies on both sides limiting themselves to rapid
reinforcement of their local garrisons, without any further
exchange of fire.

Moscow's exploitation of the incident has fallen into
three distinct phases: initial reporting with limited
exploitation, then a period of deescalation, followed by the
current phase which can best be described as maximum political
and propagandist exploitation.

The Initial Reporting Phase

Moscow issued its first Tass statement on Sunday
evening, only about 12 hours after the clash had taken place.
This was the first occasion on which the USSR had admitted
deaths among its border guards on the Sino-Soviet frontier
as a result of an infantry battle, although in the past
numerous border guards are reported to have been killed
occasionally in clashes with agents and smugglers.

[page 2]

On the same day (Sunday, 2nd March), the Soviet
Government, which is headed by A.N. Kosygin, sent its
protest note concerning Damansky to the Chinese
Government [1]. It accused the Chinese troops of "crossing
the Soviet state border and moving on Damansky Island."

The clear implication is that Moscow regards the
border in this area as being somewhere west of the
island itself, though the Chinese claim that the island
(Chenpao, or Treasure Island) is legally on Chinese soil.
The Soviet note also disclosed that more than 200 Chinese
troops were involved, i.e. that it was a company-size
skirmish, and that they had used both machine-guns,
submachine-guns, and heavier weapons (the latter being sited
on the Chinese bank of the river).

The Soviet note demanded immediate punishment of those
responsible, but unlike the counter-protest sent to the
Kremlin by Peking did not ask for compensation. It
described the purpose of the Chinese action as being to
aggravate the situation on the Sino-Soviet border," and whether
or not this was the true aim, the incident has certainly
had that effect.

The Kremlin's note ended with the usual warning of a
"rebuff" for any further provocation. In fact the Soviet
Army has only fifteen divisions to man the thousand miles
of frontier east of Lake Baikal, and of these only ten
were at full strength as of September 1968 [2], with the
other five in the second category of readiness.
Consequently it seems likely that until the Damansky skirmish, the
Red Army had considerably less than 150,000 men for the
whole length of the Amur and Ussuri River lines.

It follows that, while the Soviet Army is
unquestionably better equipped with armour, artillery, missiles and
aircraft than the Chinese, it is not necessarily greatly or
at all superior in infantry on the spot, and a succession
of scattered border clashes of the pin-prick or harrassing
variety would put a major strain on its resources.

For this reason it seems somewhat improbable that
Moscow provoked the Damansky skirmish in order to distract
attention from the failure of its threats against the
Bundestag meeting in West Berlin, and rather more likely that the
clash was accidental. The true reasons for the incident
may never be known in the West, but one can say with some
assurance that Moscow's initial exploitation of it was
deliberately limited in scope.

----------------
(1) Izvestia, 4 March 1969.

(2) "The Military Balance, 1968-69," I.S.S., London 1968,
page 6.

[page 3]

For example on 3rd March the usual round of protest
meetings began, but at this stage they were confined to
the Far East, including Khabarovsk, Blagoveshchensk, and
Vladivostok [3]

In Peking the few Soviet diplomats remaining there
were able to stage one of their numerous walk-outs on
March 3rd, when a Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister, Chi
Peng-fei, began to criticize Soviet-US "collusion" in the
Middle East at a reception given by the Moroccan Embassy [4]

On March 4th Moscow leaked to the Western news agencies
the fact that there had been more than thirty dead on the
Soviet side alone, and Tass that evening followed up with
the announcement that China had rejected the Soviet protest
note. Tass also put the" blame for the massive anti-Soviet
demonstrations in China on the "Mao Tse-tung group," which
was said to need an atmosphere of anti-Soviet hysteria in
order to annul the decisions of the 8th Congress of the
C.P.C. and to set the 9th Congress on the road of
adventurism and extreme chauvinism."

The Deescalation Phase

On March 5th, a relative lull began in the Soviet use
of the incident, and lasted until the morning of the 7th.
During this time the Soviet Embassy in Peking was under
siege by hundreds of thousands of Chinese, while Tass and
Aeroflot employees in the city were being beaten up or
manhandled. Red Star and the major Soviet newspapers
temporarily ceased to comment on Damansky, but Radio Moscow
carried one broadcast on 6th March which argued that the
"armed intrusion" must have been deliberate provocation.
"The organizers drive thousands of people to anti-Soviet
rallies even during the working hours of the day," Radio
Moscow angrily announced. (During the following two days,
the Moscow rulers drove 150,000 Russians to the Chinese
Embassy in Moscow and had them march past it, chanting
anti-Mao slogans and bombarding it with coloured inks).

Trud (March 5th) was the only newspaper to provide
any information on the clash, with an eye-witness account
which added little to what was already known except that
the Soviet patrol leader had been killed and that the
Chinese had taken the Russians by surprise, with their
arms slung. On March 6th the press maintained a complete
blackout on news, despite inspired leaks to Western
journalists, to the effect that aircraft were leaving for
Khabarovsk carrying relatives to the funeral of the dead
border guards,

------------------

(3) Tass, 4 March 1969.

(4) New York Times, 4 March 1969.

[page 4]

The Maximum Exploitation Phase

The relative lull on 5th and 6th March ended
explosively on March 7th, with the Kremlin letting fly from
all the heaviest weapons in its propaganda armoury.

The funeral took place, attended by Andropov's first
deputy, Colonel-General Zakharov of the KGB [5]. Zakharov's
speech claimed that the USSR still holds the island, and
the dead were buried in a common grave.

Later that day a press conference was organized by
the Foreign Ministry in Moscow, at which the exact number
of dead was announced (31 of the Soviet troops, Chinese
casualities unspecified) and the Chinese were accused of
bayoneting the wounded to death.

It was also stated that mortars and grenade throwers
had been used by the Chinese. Photographs were distributed
of men made unrecognizable by mutilation, and these were
subsequently shown on TV, so as to achieve the maximum
impact. The number of Soviet troops in the skirmish was
given for the first time (60, or about two platoons),
presumably to show that they were outnumbered, A General,
Fedorenko, who is a Deputy Chief of the Main Administration
of the Border Troops, even went so Jar as to claim that the
Chinese had been given large quantities of alcohol before
the attack. The press conference ended with dark hints
that Mao's group are now collaborating with the US and
W. Germany, in an effort to "encircle" the USSR,

Meanwhile, outside the Chinese Embassy, the largest
political demonstration since the Korean War was in full
swing, with the first of 150,000 marchers breaking windows
and burning Mao in effigy, feebly and good-humouredly
"restrained" from time to time by the police. Mass
indignation meetings were held throughout the USSR, including
Georgia, Azerbaijan, Alma-Ata, Karaganda, Chita,
Tselinograd, Khabarovsk etc. It was therefore evident that" the
emphasis was on the border areas, and the Kremlin seemed
to be preparing for further trouble on the Kazakh frontier
as well as on the Amur-Ussuri line

While all these civilian propaganda ploys were being
trotted out, Moscow also displayed a limited degree of
sabre-rattling. The army newspaper Red Star (8 March 1969)
announced that the missile troops in the Far East had just
finished some successful manoeuvres. A sergeant in a

---------------------

(5) Tass, 7 March 1969.

[page 5]

missile unit was quoted as saying that he would:

answer the Chinese authorities with
increased vigilance and battle readiness.

This is believed to be the first recorded instance
of a threat of missile retaliation against China by name,
and it may not be ineffective in view of the fact that
the Chinese missile units are still only in their infancy,
if indeed they are operational yet at anything more
dangerous than the surface-to-air level. Another "first"
recorded this week was the announcement of Red Army
volunteers applying to be sent to the "most difficult"
areas on the Chinese border. The threat of "volunteers"
has repeatedly been used in the past against Western
"imperialist" powers, but never before has it been dusted off
for employment against another "socialist" country.

Possible Motives for the Exploitation Pattern

If Moscow did not provoke the incident, which seems
probable as otherwise more than 60 men would have been
employed against 200 (that figure was later raised to 300 --
Moscow Radio, 11 March 1969), the first phase of initial
reporting and limited exploitation can be
explained by the fact that an incident of such dimensions
probably could not have been kept secret for long. The
Chinese were bound to make propaganda out of it, and
Moscow had to have some propaganda riposte available. The
second phase of deescalation is more puzzling, but it
happened when the Berlin meeting was taking place, and it
may simply be due to an unwillingness to risk the
development of a major crisis-on two fronts simultaneously.

However, by the time the third phase (maximal
exploitation) began, the Kremlin was reasonably sure that
Berlin, if not already dead, was a dying issue, and could
give its undivided attention to China, where the
provocation at the Soviet Embassy in Peking, and quite possibly
at points along the frontiers, had been mounting throughout
the 4th, 5th and 6th of March.

Moreover the planning was already far advanced for
the next Warsaw Pact meeting (possibly to take place on
17th March) [6], and Moscow, which has been having
exceptional difficulty in dealing with the Rumanian opposition
to manoeuvres, to a new organizational structure, and to

-------------------

(6) The Times, London, 11 March 1969.

[page 6]

"limited sovereignty," may well have thought that to
whip up some sympathy by exaggerating the "yellow peril"
might be helpful in E. Europe. At the very least, the
answer that danger from Mao was imminent could be given
to those, such as E, Germans and Poles, who may be
arguing that the USSR was insufficiently belligerent
towards the Bundestag. This was almost certainly not a
main motive for the Soviet attitude, but it may have been
a subsidiary one.

The probable Soviet attempt to exploit the frontier
skirmish at next week's reported meeting of the Warsaw
Pact countries is paralleled by a somewhat similar move
towards diplomatic exploitation in the West. Yesterday
(11th March) the Soviet ambassador to Bonn paid a call on
Chancellor Kiesinger, and delivered a Government statement
on the Ussuri incident in the course of which he claimed
that 2000 border infringements had taken place since 1960,
and that Chinese foreign policy constitutes a danger to "all
the Asiatic peoples" [7]. Presumably the other major
Western powers have been similarly informed, the Soviet
note is probably unprecedented in communist diplomatic
practice, in that it appears to claim the sympathy and
understanding of the NATO powers in the face of the Chinese
threat to the borders of the USSR.

This threat is being played up for domestic consumption
as well. For example Radio Moscow (home service) on 11th
March broadcast the following:

The Press Department of the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs of the CRP has disseminated an
article in which extravagant claims are made for
the reexamination of the Sino-Soviet frontier

The purpose of this type of report (even granted that
it may well be1 factually accurate) is clearly to show that
Damansky is not an isolated incident, and that the danger
is much greater than to this one uninhabited island in a
changing riverbed.

Coming at the time of both the Yugoslav Party Congress
and the preparatory meeting in Moscow for the world
communist conference scheduled for May, such reports are alto
expeoted by the Kremlin to help to persuade many parties
which are inclined to "neutralism" in the Sino-Soviet
ideological dispute to adopt a stronger anti-Chinese
posture, and perhaps even to condemn Mao's "adventurism."

-------------------
(7) Sueddeutsche Zeitung, 12 March 1969.

[page 7]

The mere fact that the ploy may not succeed is not, in
Moscow's view, a good reason for not at least trying it
out.

The Military Balance

It is often said in the Western press that the Soviet
armies in the East have been substantially reinforced since
the clashes involving refugees in 1962, 1963 and 1964.
Indeed Mao Tse-tung himself proclaimed that:

The USSR is concentrating troops on her
frontier. (Pravda, 2 September 1964 quoting Mao's
interview with Japanese socialists).

While this is certainly true qualitatively, in terms
of numbers the Brezhnev-Kosygin team actually has or at
least had until March 2nd) fewer divisions in the Far East
than Khrushchev had in 1964. At that time the Red Army
had 17 divisions in the Far East [8], compared with only 15
in 1368 until March 1st, 1969.

The normal Chinese deployment pattern of recent years
has had six divisions in Sinkiang, six in Inner Mongolia,
and 28 in Manchuria and Peking [9].

Consequently the Soviet infantry along the border
east of Lake Baikal is clearly outnumbered, for all its
superiority in supporting arms and air/missile power,
particularly as the average Chinese division is substantially
larger than the average Soviet one.

Moreover one major geopolitical factor must be weighed.
It is not impossible that Peking, after witnessing the US
efforts to deAmericanize the war in Vietnam in order to
facilitate the withdrawal of at least some US troops this
year, may no longer view the danger to the South China
border and coastline as being as imminent as in the recent
past. In that case a redeployment northwards and to the
north-west of some of the fifty-three divisions now located
to ward off an invasion from Taiwan becomes at the least a
theoretical possibility, and after Damansky it may be even
more than that. Any such move would make the Soviet border
problems in Kazakhstan, the Mongolian People's Republic
and the Amur-Ussuri lines even more difficult than they
already are, and might well involve quantitative as well as

-----------------------

(8) "The Military Balance, 1964-65," I.S.S. London, 1964, p. 4.

(9) "The Military Balance, 1968-69," I.S.S. London, 1968,
pp 10-11.

[page 8]

qualitative reinforcement.

Finally, while Kosygin's government is busy informing
Bonn, Tokyo, and no doubt London, Paris, Rome and
Washington of its difficulties in restraining Mao's troops, one
recalls at once that the USSR's first action when President
Nixon took office was to assure him of its interest in talks
on the limitation of ABMs and ICBMs. To play up the
"yellow peril" on the frontiers carries the implication
that more money must be allotted in the Soviet defense
budget to the conventional arms, and that therefore there
might be less available for the Soviet ABM lobby, which in
any case has had a thin time in the last two or three years.
It would not be rating Kosygin's subtlety too high to
suggest that a proportion of this message may be intended
for Washington, and some part of it for internal Soviet
consumption by the military-industrial pressure group in
the USSR.

Summary: This paper examines the use made by
Soviet propaganda and diplomacy of the Damansky
skirmish. It argues that the exploitation has so
far been divided into three phases, and suggests
some reasons why this apparent division should have
been thought necessary. It also draws attention
to some of the military factors operating on the
Siberian, Mongolian and Kazakh borders, arguing
that the Soviet position may be changing for the
worse as an indirect result of the deemphasis by
Washington of the war in Vietnam.

r.r.g.

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