The Soviet Union

Sergei Blagov, "Missile Ambushes: Soviet Air Defense Aid," Vietnam, August 2001.

King Chen, "North Vietnam in the Sino-Soviet Dispute, 1962-64", Asian Survey 4:9 (September 1964), pp. 1023-1036. If you browse the Internet through an institution that has subscribed to JSTOR, you can access the text directly or go through the JSTOR Asian Survey browse page.

Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Issue 16 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2008), has been placed online in chunks.

Part 1 (pp. 7-104) includes: "Russian Documents on the 1954 Geneva Conference." Introduction by Paul Wingrove (p. 85). Translated texts of documents (pp. 86-103).

Part 4 (pp. 341-446) contains "Twenty-Four Soviet-Bloc Documents on Vietnam and the Sino-Soviet Split, 1964-1966." Introduction by Lorenz M. Lüthi (pp. 367-370). Translated texts of documents (pp. 371-).

Anatoly (Anatoliy) Dobrynin, In confidence: Moscow's Ambassador to American's Six Cold War Presidents (1962-1986).  New York: Times Books (Random House), 1995.  xiii, 672 pp.

John Dumbrell, President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Communism. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2004. 192 pp. Two chapters (pp. 91-133) are devoted to the Vietnam War.

Embassy of the USSR in the DRV, "Political Report, Embassy of the USSR in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam for the Year 1970." March 1971. 29 pp. This is an English translation of selected pages; the Russian original appears to have been considerably longer. I believe the translation was probably done in the 1990s by the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Office, but there is no indication on the document of who did the translation and the selection of pages, or when. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.

Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. 670 pp. This has been favorably reviewed, but when I skimmed the discussion of the Laos crisis of early 1961, I saw a remarkable level of misunderstanding. Fursenko and Naftali appear to be under the impression that the neutralist forces supporting Souvanna Phouma took Vientiane (the capital of Laos) early in 1961, and that Souvanna Phouma was running the government of Laos, supported by the United States, during the next few months (see pp. 335, 345, 351).

Ilya Gaiduk, Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy Toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954-1963. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. xxi, 286 pp.

Ilya Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996. xx, 299 pp.

Raymond L. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan. Washington: Brookings Institution, 1985. xvi, 1147 pp. Rev. ed., 1994: xx, 1206 pp. This massive study is disappointingly brief in its comments on Vietnam.

J.L.S. Girling, "Russia and Indochina in International Perspective." International Affairs 49:4 (October 1973), pp. 608-16. If you browse the Internet through an institution that has subscribed to JSTOR, you can access the text online.

Sergei Khrushchev, ed., Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 3, Statesman (1953-1964). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. x, 1126 pp. The section titled "Ho Chi Minh" (pp. 498-508) is surprisingly pessimistic about Soviet-Vietnamese relations.

Leonid Krichevsky, ed., Vietnam: Internationalism in Action. Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1973. 47 pp.

Kurt L. London, "Vietnam: A Sino-Soviet Dilemma", Russian Review, 26:1 (Jan 1967), pp. 26-37. If you browse the Internet through an institution that has subscribed to JSTOR, you can access the text directly or go through the JSTOR Russian Review browse page.

R. A. Longmire, Soviet Relations with South-East Asia: An Historical Survey. London & New York: K. Paul International, 1989.

Luong Thi Hong, "Center and Periphery in the Cold War: Soviet Economic Aid to Vietnam, 1954-1975," International History Review 46:2 (2024), pp. 176-90.

Lorenz M. Lüthi, "Beyond Betrayal: Beijing, Moscow, and the Paris Negotiations, 1971-1973." Journal of Cold War Studies 11:1 (Winter 2009), pp. 57-107.

Major General V. Matsulenko, "The War in South Vietnam (On the Occasion of the Tenth Anniversary of the Creation of the People's Liberation Armed Forces)." 16 pp. English translation of an article originally published in Voenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal, January 1971, pp. 37-49. Pretty inaccurate; the greatest value is probably in the two pages of endnotes, which contain references to other articles on the war, published in the Soviet Union, that would otherwise be hard to find. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.

John Michael Miller, "Soviet Strategy in Indochina, January 1969 through January 1973." Ph.D. dissertation, History, George Washington University, 1982. 308 pp. AAT 8211772. The abstract is not very impressive.

Stephen J. Morris, "The Origins of the Soviet-Vietnamese Alliance." Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia, 1987. 634 pp. I have not seen this one, but I am dubious about it.

Stephen J. Morris, The Soviet-Chinese-Vietnamese Triangle in the 1970's: The View from Moscow. Cold War International History Project Working Paper no. 25. Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center, 1999. 42 pp. Full text (PDF format) available online.

Richard A. Moss, "Behind the Back Channel: Achieving Détente in U.S.-Soviet Relations, 1969-1972." Ph.D. dissertation, The George Washington University, 2009. xiii, 506 pp. This very interesting study makes good use of the Nixon tapes. There are a couple of long chapters on the way the Vietnam War interacted with U.S.-Soviet relations.

Richard Moss, Nixon's Back Channel to Moscow: Confidential Diplomacy and Détente. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017. 418 pp.

Keith L. Nelson, The Making of Detente: Soviet-American Relations in the Shadow of Vietnam.  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.  xviii, 217 pp.

Nguyen Ngoc Mao and Vu Thi Hong Chuyen, "Nhin lai quan he Xo-Viet thor ky 1945-1975." Nghien cuu lich su, no. 346 (March 2005), pp. 58-66. Very critical of Khrushchev's refusal to support the revolution in South Vietnam.

I. A. Ognetov, Na v'etnamskom napravlenii. Moskva: Gumanitarii, 2007. 322 pp.

Mari Olsen, Solidarity and National Revolution: The Soviet Union and the Vietnamese Communists, 1954-1960, Hovedfag-thesis, University of Oslo, 1996, published as issue 4/1997 of Forsvarsstudier/Defense Studies, Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, Oslo. 169 pp. This study, based on considerable archival research in Moscow, is particularly valuable for the light it sheds on the Lao Dong Party 15th Plenum in 1959, and the reluctance of the LDP to consult or even inform the Soviets about its decisions.

Mari Olsen, Soviet-Vietnam Relations and the Role of China, 1949-64: Changing Alliances. London and New York: Routledge (Francis & Taylor), 2006. xx, 201 pp. This work, researched in Russian archives, looks extremely interesting.

Douglas Pike, Vietnam and the Soviet Union: Anatomy of an Alliance. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1987. xvi, 271 pp. I haven't seen this, but I would not expect it to be very good.

Mokie Pratt Porter, "Breakthrough: Americans from the Ground Up." VVA Veteran, 26:1 (January-February 2006), pp. 25-28. A delegation from VVA went to Kharkov, in the Ukraine, in November 2005, where there is an association of veterans of the Vietnam War. Discussed the war and American MIAs with various people including Prof. Nikolay Shershnev (University of Air Forces, Ukraine Ministry of Defense), who is writing a book about Soviet personnel in the Vietnam War.

Merle Pribbenow, The Soviet-Vietnamese Intelligence Relationship during the Vietnam War, CWIHP Working Paper #73. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2014. 17 pp.

General Oleg Sarin and Colonel Lev Dvoretsky, Alien Wars: The Soviet Union's Aggressions Against the World. Novato, CA: Presidio, 1996. xiv, 243 pp. Chapter V, pp. 87-114 followed by photos, deals with Vietnam. Not very well written, but contains some interesting details.

Niklay Shershnev, "No One Is Forgotten; Nothing Is Forgotten.", VVA Veteran 26:4 (July/August 2006), pp. 23-26. Soviet assistance to and participation in the air defense of the DRV.

W.R. Smyser, The Independent Vietnamese: Vietnamese Communism Between Russia and China, 1956-1969. Athens: Ohio University Press, Center for International Studies, 1980.

Balázs Szalontai, "The 'Sole Legal Government of Vietnam': The Bao Dai Factor and Soviet Attitudes toward Vietnam, 1947-1950," Journal of Cold War Studies 20:3 (2018), 3-56.

Balazs Szalontai, "Solidarity within Limits: Interkit and the Evolution of the Soviet Bloc's Indochina Policy, 1967-1985," Cold War History 17:4 (2017), pp. 385-403. Interkit was an organization that the Soviets established to mobilize and coordinate support, primarily from East European Communist countries, for the Soviet position in the Sino-Soviet dispute.

Ramesh Thakur and Carlyle Thayer, Soviet Relations with India and Vietnam. New York: St. Martin's, 1992. 315 pp.

The Cold War International History Project (CWIHP), based at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, has recently been publishing a considerable amount of good scholarship on the Cold War, including Soviet policies toward Indochina, and English translations of documents recently released from Russian archives. Most of this material is available at CWIHP web sites.
Start here for a search engine that leads to versions in HTML format only.
Start here for a search that leads to versions in both HTML and PDF formats.

Return to Table of Contents

Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2024, Edwin E. Moise. This document may be reproduced only by permission. Revised April 18, 2024.