Červený Poplach: The NATO-Soviet Standoff Over Czechoslovakia

Well that is always the best thing is it.

  


PART 28/Good Fences Don’t Always Make Good Neighbors

To many top Soviet political and military leaders in the early winter of 1968-69, the phrase “Happy Holidays” would have sounded like a macabre joke at best. In just six short months they had watched the seemingly unbreakable Warsaw Pact crumble into dust; NATO essentially kick the Red Army out of eastern Europe; Finland start to assert itself for the first time in generations; an armed rebellion break out in the Ukraine, the USSR’s agricultural heartland; and growing numbers of ordinary Soviet citizens raise their voices in protest not just of the Brezhnev regime’s intervention in Czechoslovakia but of the regime itself. In Hungary, the Romanian army was getting closer every day to making good on the late Nicolae Ceausescu’s promise to have the Romanian flag flying over Budapest by Christmas. And as if a bell had been rung to signal the commencement of further misfortune for the besieged Soviet Union, China’s Mao Zedong was now energetically laying the groundwork for the People’s Liberation Army to launch a campaign to take control of the disputed Ussuri River region along the Soviet-Chinese border. Every day Chinese state radio would boast of a “forest of bayonets” ready to crush any Soviet attempt to move into northern China; propaganda posters all over Beijing displayed slogans predicting the swift liberation of the Ussuri territories from the “despicable revisionists” in Moscow; China’s fledgling nuclear weapons program had embarked on a crash expansion under the premise that the People’s Republic would sooner or later need to resort to the Bomb to protect its interests in the disputed region; and last but not least Chinese spy planes repeatedly penetrated Soviet airspace to photograph potential targets for a PLA attack.

The border dispute itself was nothing new; long before Mao’s takeover of China in 1949 or even the October Revolution of 1917 that toppled Russia’s Kerensky government, the two countries had been arguing over ownership of Damansky(a.k.a. Zhenbao) Island and the surrounding countryside. But the sharp break between Moscow and Beijing following Khrushchev’s post-mortem denunciation of Stalin in 1956 served to intensify the acrimony over the border question, and as the Sino-Soviet split widened in the early ‘60s, many outside observers feared a territorial war between the rival Marxist powers was not just possible but maybe inevitable. For many Soviet military commanders in the Far East the start of the Czech War couldn’t have come at a worse time-- it meant many crucial resources would be diverted away from the Siberian theater precisely when the Red Army would most need every bit of materiel and troop strength it could get in order to mount an effective defense of Soviet interests in the region. Those commanders’ anxieties would only deepen as NATO held the line in Czechoslovakia and pushed deep into East Germany. The collapse of the Gomulka regime in Poland escalated their fears into full-fledged terror. And when it became clear Gustav Husak’s puppet state in eastern Czechoslovakia was going to fall to NATO troops, it felt to these generals and their soldiers like a sign of the Apocalypse.

If he hadn’t been an atheist, then-Chinese defense minister Lin Biao would have regarded these events as the answer to a prayer. In any event he had to pleased at the strategic and tactical opportunities that were opening up for the People’s Republic along its Siberian border. On November 23rd, 1968 he called a special conference of the People’s Liberation Army general staff to outline his vision for bringing the Ussuri River territories under Beijing’s control. With the Kremlin effectively ejected from central Europe and stuck in a quagmire of a guerrilla war in the Ukraine, Lin said, the time was right for China to make its move. None of Lin’s generals had any doubt that his goal of capturing the disputed regions could be achieved; their only uncertainly was what would be the best way to go about accomplishing it. Some of the generals favored launching a massive Blitzkrieg-style assault to take the entire region in one sharp blow; others advocated a series of smaller-scale attacks to gradually wear down Red Army defenses in the region. A few advocated the bold step of launching a surprise offensive from the Heilongjiang area to occupy the Soviet Pacific port of Vladivostok and use it as a bargaining chip to force Moscow to give in to the CPC’s territorial demands. The meeting adjourned early on the morning of November 24th with Lin's generals having agreed on a multi-stage plan to establish a Chinese foothold in the disputed border regions.

But if Lin and his advisors thought Moscow would simply sit on its hands while the PLA turned southern Siberia into a Chinese colony, they were in for a rude awakening. Even as the PLA was marshalling its troops for the expected initial thrust into the Damansky region the Red Army's Far Eastern command-- stretched thin though its resources were --weren't about to surrender the island to Beijing without putting up a fight. When KGB operatives in North Korea cabled Yuri Andropov on November 27th with confirmation of Beijing's military buildup along the Siberian border, the Red Army Far East Military District headquarters in Khabarovsk swiftly activated all its available first and second line divisions and placed a number of Soviet air force attack squadrons in positions where they could hit Chinese bases on a moment's notice. And if those weren't enough to make the PLA think twice about marching across the Soviet border, the Soviet Navy's Pacific fleet had a half-dozen Yankee-class ballistic missile submarines ready to unleash the fires of hell on Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing. Western intelligence analysts were deeply alarmed by the rising hostilities between the rival Communist powers-- and the Soviet deployment of a squadron of nuclear-armed Tu-16 bombers to positions within striking range of the Heilongjiang provincial capital of Harbin in early December certainly didn't calm anyone's nerves.

Even without nuclear weapons in the mix, the situation along the Sino-Soviet border was still highly volatile; Soviet and Chinese infantry detachments regularly traded gunfire whenever they came face-to-face and outposts on both sides of the frontier sustained heavy damage from artillery fire. It was a situation to give even the most optimistic people nightmares. And it wasn't the only one; thousands of miles away from the disputed Damansky territories, political tensions in Northern Ireland were on the verge of hitting the boiling point as the already sharp divide between Irish Protestants and Catholics was being exacerbated by acrimonious debate over London's treatment of Irish veterans of the Czech War....

TO BE CONTINUED

(OOC: Happy New Year!)

Well, to bring you up to speed, the TL;DR version is that as we get to Part 29 Bulgaria has been knocked out of the war as the result of a botched attempt to invade Romania while Yugoslavia has just declared war on the Soviet Union after a massacre of anti-Brezhnev protesters in Moscow. As for Albania, I haven't talked about them much since they're practically a non-factor in military terms but I might expand on their domestic political situation a bit in the next ten-episode segment.

Quick message to everybody who's been following this thread: I haven't given up on posting Part 30. It's just that my train of thought has been stalled on the tracks lately.

  

INTERMISSION 3/Where We Go From Here

First, my apologies for the delays in getting Part 30 up; my life's been absolutely insane since January. Second, I'd like to thank everyone who's read the series so far for their support and encourage those of you who haven't read it yet to check it out. Third and most important, I wanted to let you all in on some of what you can look forward to in the next ten-episode segment of this series:

--the long-awaited big Romanian push on Budapest;
--further exploration of how the Czech War affects popular culture;
--the escalation of the anti-Brezhnev rebellion in Ukraine; 
--how Syria and Egypt are struggling to maintain their military strength as their relations with the Soviet Union continue to sour;
--rumblings of discontent within the upper echelons of the North Korean regime;
--and of course the outbreak of full-blown war on the Chinese-Soviet border.

Stay tuned. 

My condolences for your loss.