The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War

Abstract

Bhat reviews "The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War" by Ilya V. Gaiduk.

The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War. By Ilya V. Gaiduk. Chicago: Ivan R Dee, 1996. ISBN 1-56663-103-3. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xx, 299. $28.50.

The primary interest of Gaiduk's carefully researched and persuasive study lies in its unprecedented and exclusive access to previously unseen documents concerning the USSR's involvement in the Vietnam conflict: reports from the Soviet embassy in Hanoi, records of official conversations, and a variety of intelligence reports and Central Committee memoranda. The author concentrates on the period from 1964 and the initial involvement of the Johnson administration to the signing of the January 1973 Paris peace agreements, although the bulk of the analysis is devoted to the years leading up to Nixon's 1968 election. Gaiduk's interpretive focus is the origins, motivations, and particulars of Soviet policy, but he effectively integrates, where necessary, a sensible analysis of the roles of the U.S., China, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), and the Viet Cong.

The book argues convincingly that the USSR's approach to the war was a continuation of the flexible, hardheaded, yet profoundly contradictory foreign policy that Lenin himself pursued decades earlier: the simultaneous quest for international communist revolution and peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world. Gaiduk aptly describes Moscow's diplomatic behavior during the Cold War as a "seemingly impossible combination of revolutionary militancy and geopolitical reasonableness" (p. x).

In Gaiduk's view, the USSR pursued its tensely dualistic policy with consistency if not ease in three distinct phases. Initially, from early 1964 through early 1968, and especially following the Gulf of Tonkin crisis, the Soviets gave increasing assistance to the DRV's war effort while exploring ways to prevent heightened American military participation in an escalated struggle. In the second phase, from May 1968 to January 1969, the opening stage of the Paris peace talks, the USSR shifted its emphasis, and, rather than function merely as a U.S.-North Vietnam intermediary, played an assertive, peacemaking role in the negotiations.

Finally, with the advent of the Nixon-Kissinger era, the Soviets effectively reduced their purely diplomatic role in the war's resolution, and focused instead on securing the future DRV's place in the USSR's Asian sphere of influence. Concluding on a somber note, Gaiduk suggests that the outcome in Vietnam, although "victorious" for the USSR in certain respects, pushed its foreign policy in a direction ultimately ruinous to Soviet socialism by begetting misadventures and hubristic overreaching, of which the Afghanistan fiasco is perhaps the most vivid example.

This monograph generally succeeds as diplomatic history, despite the wealth of archival materials as yet untapped by historians of the war. It is clearly written, well organized, and offers a conceptually coherent narrative. Still, the author is properly cautious and restrained in his judgments, sadly aware that once again, since 1993, Russian officials have closed off for political reasons the remarkable collection of documents that made this study possible.

Girish N. Bhat

SUNY Cortland

Cortland, New York