long using our bare hands. We got ourselves some bear spears and maces
with metal heads similar to those used by epic warriors.... The weapons
become hugely popular with all the border guards stationed around the
area.”
Seen from a distance as they played out across the moonlit snow and
through the leafless willows, these running battles would have borne a
striking resemblance to the first confrontations between Cossacks and
Manchus three hundred years earlier. Mao, it is now generally believed,
was capitalizing on these historic rivalries in an effort to whip up some
politically useful nationalistic fervor. However, he had chosen to do this
with the world’s leading nuclear power: it was brinkmanship of a bold
and frightening kind. On March 2, 1969, two weeks after Vladimir
Markov reached draft age, the border guards’ strict no-shooting order was
violated in the form of a carefully orchestrated ambush by the Chinese. In
the ensuing gun battle, the first of its kind on a Russian border since the
Second World War, thirty-one Russians were gunned down. Within days,
thousands of Russian and Chinese troops, backed by artillery, were
massed along the frozen Ussuri.
On March 15, three days before the United States began its four-year
bombing campaign against Cambodia, there was a major battle at
Damansky/Zhen Bao in which hundreds of Russian and Chinese soldiers
died. Both nations, sobered by the potential for a full-blown war,
withdrew to their respective sides. Mao ordered extensive tunnel
networks to be dug on the Ussuri’s left bank, allegedly in preparation for
a nuclear attack by Russia. Moscow, too, prepared for the worst, calling
for a major troop buildup along the Ussuri and Amur rivers. Five
thousand miles away, in Kaliningrad, Vladimir Markov received his draft
notice. By the end of 1969, twenty-nine divisions of the Soviet army
(nearly half a million soldiers) were massed along the border, and Private
Markov was among them. For a seaman’s son from Baltic Russia, it
would have been hard to imagine a more remote posting, or a less
auspicious one.
ron
(Ron)
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