each other like so many tectonic plates. The world as we know it was
forming then, along fault lines of race, culture, and geography. By mid-
century, though, China was in trouble: embroiled in the Opium Wars with
France and England, it was further hobbled by a protracted internal
rebellion that had left Manchuria effectively defenseless. Imperial Russia
had already taken advantage of this window of weakness on its Pacific
frontier by annexing all disputed lands north of the Amur River in 1858.
Two years later, Czar Alexander II went a step further and coerced the
Chinese into signing the Treaty of Peking, thereby adding another slice of
Outer Manchuria—what is now Primorye and southern Khabarovsk
Territory—to the Russian empire. In the mid-1960s, it seemed as if Mao
might try to get them back.
While Chairman Mao was engineering his Great Leap Forward and
vying for control of China’s Communist Party, he was also publicly
criticizing the Treaty of Peking, even going so far as to demand
reparations from Russia. By 1968 Sino-Soviet relations had sunk to a
historic low, and one of the by-products was a new front in the Cold War.
It yawned open in a surprising place: a small island in the middle of the
Ussuri River, twenty miles due west of Yuri Trush’s hometown. The
Russians call it Damansky Island and the Chinese call it Zhen Bao
(Treasure Island); either way, this seasonally flooded smear of field and
forest exhibits no obvious strategic value. Nonetheless, its ambiguous
location met Mao’s criteria for a contentious and unifying reminder of
past humiliations at the hands of a long-dead imperialist.
By the winter of 1968, the island and adjacent riverbank had become
the site of increasingly violent skirmishes—brawls, really—between
Chinese and Soviet border guards. “Each Siberian would be confronted by
a cluster of Chinese servicemen armed with boat hooks, pickets and
sticks with spiked heads,” wrote Lieutenant General (Ret.)^2 Vitaly
Bubenin, who was declared a Hero of the Soviet Union for his bravery
during the climax of these confrontations. “We didn’t have body armor
back then. My men were wearing thick winter sheepskin jackets. The
fights occurred on a daily basis and ... we realized that we wouldn’t last