Originally Posted by Jason Weiser
Here's my take:
It's a bit conspiratorial, but considering the nature of Soviet internal politics...
The events that led to the Sino-Soviet War of 1995 are rather complex, further complicated by the fact that many records have been lost since the destruction of Moscow, and more specifically, the archives of the CPSU, KGB, and STAVKA (though the STAVKA alternate site at Mount Yamantau survived the Twilight War).
What is known, both from surviving records, and recovered diaries from participants on the Defense Council (Many Russians were compulsive diarists, and those diaries have proven very useful to historians seeking to reconstruct the events of the summer of 1995), is that the rivalries between two men, Yevgeni Danilov, General Secretary of the CPSU, and Premier of the Soviet Union, and Georgi Sauronski, Defense Minister of the Soviet Union had reached a head. Both men detested each other personally, and were polar opposites politically, even if both had cooperated closely during the coup against Gorbachev in 1989.
But Danilov, while maintaining Party control of the Soviet Union, and her allies, pursued more "conservative" versions of Gorbachev's reforms, and was slowly downsizing the armed forces, something that Sauronski took quite personally. One of the more unpopular reforms was the idea that Danilov was going to spin off the Army's Construction Troops into a state owned (run by the Interior Ministry, an old friend of Danilov) but privately run cooperative, something that Sauronski and many of his underlings were threatened by as the Ministry's Construction Troops had brought in a measure of hard currency for the Defense Ministry, with a small measure of foreign investment (some Swiss and Swedish investment houses) requiring new headquarters in Moscow with which to branch out from into the untapped Soviet markets.
But, with Danilov moving to undo that, plus his encouragement of replacing long-term Soviet allies (like Honaker specifically) with men such as say, Egon Krenz, in the case of East Germany, Sauronski was incensed, and sought to find something to bring down Danilov, and perhaps elevate either himself or a trusted underling to the post of General Secretary (Biographers of Sauronski suspect the latter).
Sauronski had an ally in the head of the KGB, Marko Yudenitch, who was both a rabid Soviet patriot and a bit of a hot head. He was a former protégé of Andropov and shared much of his views about the West. To Yudenitch, Danilov was a threat to the very pillars of the Soviet state. Both he and Sauronski agreed that something had to be done.
Yudenitch provided that something. He passed orders on the night of July 9th, 1995 to all KGB Border Guard commanders on the Chinese border to "be alert for a new wave of Chinese infiltrators" and "to shoot any illegal border crossing without any of the customary warnings." It took three days before such orders brought forward the anticipated incident, but two 9 year old Chinese boys from a village in northern Manchuria crossed into the Soviet Union on a lark (they had done this before without incident), but this time, both were shot by a very nervous KGB Border Guard whom had been just reminded of the orders.
The local Chinese People's Armed Police commander crossed the border and demanded to speak to his Soviet Border Guard counterpart. He was not only rudely rebuffed, but fired upon. It wasn't long before the skirmishes escalated to artillery duels.
With some altered after action reports in hand, Sauronski went to an emergency meeting of the full Politburo, and attempted to bring down Danilov, stating he had "left us dangerously weak, and we need a strong hand to stop the Chinese bastards before they are at the gates of Vladivostok."
Danilov still had the loyalty, or at least the disinterested acquiescence of most of the voting members of the Politburo, and survived Sauronski's challenge, he then surprised the rest of the Politburo and stated that "perhaps it was time to launch a limited operation into China to settle the matter with the Chinese once and for all." The reasons for why Danilov did this is unclear. Perhaps the leadership challenge had made him believe that any failure to contemplate serious military action against China in response to the deaths of several KGB Border Guards in the ensuing skirmishes was simply something that could not be avoided, so better to get ahead of the baying for blood coming from the hardline faction of the Politburo, but history doesn't record the reasons for Danilov's thinking.
By August, the rest was history.
Soviet Missteps - How the Soviet Politburo Misjudged Their Way Into the Third World War by Arron Eastman, Arms and Armor Press, 2019
|