“It Is Favorable To the Forces of Socialism to Keep the Americans in Southeast Asia Longer”: The Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee in the Determination of the Strategic Line of the USSR in the Second Indochina War of 1965

Based on a scrupulous review of a large body of documents from Russian and a number of foreign archives, and for the first time introduced into scholarly discourse, this article contemplates a period in the Soviet Union’s history when the influence of the USSR in world affairs reached its zenith. It was a short by historical standards span, when the so-called “collective leadership” headed by Leonid Brezhnev, Alexey Kosygin, and Nikolay Podgorny was at the helm of the Soviet state. The authors of the article show that it is unlikely that the USSR’s transformation into one of the world’s superpowers would have been possible were it not for the US’s defeat in Indochina. With the aim of proving this premise, the authors have focused on developments related to one of the turning points of the Cold War – the first half of 1965. In this context, the article closely analyzes the course and results of the negotiations between Kosygin and the leaders of the DRV, PRC, and DPRK. In fact, it was then, as evidenced by researched documents, that the Soviet Union turned de facto from an observer into an actual participant in the Vietnam War (and, more broadly, in the confrontation with the United States in the Far East) as part of the anti-American coalition of the USSR–PRC–DRV–DPRK. And although the authors in this case are talking about a strategic idea – as it happens in real politics – its birth was almost accidental, while the genuine masterminds of this geopolitical combination under consideration have remained in the shadow of history for many years.

Vietnam, Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee, The Second Indochina War, People’s Republic of China, Lê Duẩn, “tricentric” world order, constellation of crises, military aid