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One Day in Sergeant Babansky's Life
Alexandra Samarina
Thirty-four years ago, in March 1969, a Soviet-Chinese border conflict broke out on Damansky Island known in Chinese as Zhenbao. In violation of standing orders, a Soviet sergeant fired the first shot - becoming Hero of the Soviet Union
Yuri Babansky, 20, arrived at the Imansk border guard outpost a month before what was to become a central event in his life. He was transferred to this god-forsaken place on the Ussuri bank by way of disciplinary action, so to speak. The boy lacked discipline, and never finished high school. He enrolled in a vocational and technical college and then was drafted for military service, in the Border Troops. Hailing from the Kemerovo region, Siberia, he was a big, hefty fellow, which proved useful. By March 1969, there had been hundreds of illegal border crossings by the Chinese. Waving small red books with samples of Chairman Mao's wisdom, they urged our border guards to expose their revisionist bosses. "Your chief," they would shout, "is a toady to party leaders Brezhnev and Gromyko who follow a pro-U.S. policy."
Then political demands would be made: "Give us back our territory." In exchange they offered bagfuls of dried bread, packages of cigarettes, and bottles of sunflower oil. They seemed to have this odd idea that Soviet servicemen were undernourished.
As a matter of fact, Soviet border guards were pretty well-fed, and they would hold hands, forming a chain and pushing the intruders back to the Chinese bank. It was categorically forbidden to use weapons. True, the Chinese did not shoot either.
March 2 was a sunny day, a Sunday. It began, very much as usual, with an alert. The Chinese were out on the ice.
"We were not surprised," Babansky recalls. "We grabbed automatic rifles from the stacks, also taking flare guns and a radio station - everyone took whatever he was supposed to have on an allotment-of-task basis. We assembled in the courtyard. Our commander briefed us on the situation: Chinese adversaries were advancing. We were to expel them from our territory."
They went in three vehicles. The Babansky group was in the last vehicle, bringing up the rear.
"As we approached the island, I saw an empty armored personnel carrier. I asked the driver where the boys were. He said they had gone to chase the Chinese. I decided that I would not run after them but would make a flanking movement and intercept the intruders. We would rough them up a bit, as usual, and then send them home."
His decision proved fateful. Because an ambush had been set on the island. The main party, led by outpost commander Strelnikov, was massacred at point-black range. They had had no time to respond. Babansky witnessed the tragedy as he was running on the ice toward his comrades, and then he violated the order, forgetting for a while the Party and government's political decision. He commanded that fire be opened, and fired the first shot himself.
Bubenin, commander of a neighboring outpost, came to their aid. The Chinese began to retreat. The island was retaken. Then they evacuated the wounded.
"We carried them in our arms. We thought that the Chinese would shoot, but they didn't. We evacuated the wounded, put them in vehicles and sent them to the hospital. It was all over at about 1 p.m."
When Yuri returned to the outpost, he was struck by the serene environment, with music playing on the radio and lunch ready and waiting for them. True, no one was able to eat. They had a lump in their throats. All of a sudden he felt bitter.
"We were one on one with trouble. No one knew anything about us."
Yuri recalled Volodya Shusharin: He was to have gone home, but lingered on and got killed. He had twins at home waiting for him. Who was going to answer for this? Pasha Akulov, an athlete, an ice-hockey player, an erudite person, hailing from the village of Shushenskoye. He had been brought up in a single-parent family, without a father. He had a girlfriend waiting for him in his village. We kept talking about his plans for the future: where he was going to study and what he was going to be. Later on his body was returned to us by the Chinese - with marks of terrible torture.
There was another attack on March 15: This time around not only border guards but also regular army units were there to repulse it. The enemy suffered a devastating defeat. There were no major skirmishes after March 16. The total body count: 48 border guards killed. They did not count the Chinese: "I remember a machine-gunner. Also, an officer who was waving his arms, leading the attack."
Participants in those two border battles became heroes overnight.
"The first accounts were truthful. But after a while they got ‘fictionalized.' Names and events began to be confused and unknown names were cropping up."
On March 21, Babansky's citation was solemnly announced before servicemen in formation. Then he left the outpost. He returned in June, briefly, to meet with his former fellow servicemen and take a a speedboat ride past Damansky. He saw the Chinese hastily filling in a channel, thus incorporating the island in their territory. He was issued the card of a CPSU candidate member and given a present: an alarm clock.
"What does Damansky mean in your life?" I asked the former sergeant.
"It messed everything up for me. I had been preparing for a peaceful life. I wanted to live in my village, work as a technical maintenance specialist, fish in the Tom river, be near my former school teachers and friends."
But that was not to be. Perestroika found Yuri Babansky, 46, in Ukraine, with a general's rank, as deputy commander of district border troops. The government of the newly independent republic asked him to stay, but the general refused. He now lives in Moscow, working at the Railways Ministry head office.
By 1999, the underlying causes of such conflicts in the Far East had been eliminated - mainly through the transfer of disputed islands to China. This included Damansky.
"Do you not get a feeling that blood was spilled in vain?" I ask.
"I've had this feeling a long time. We should not have been sent into the line of fire in the first place. Because those disputes should have been settled through negotiations. The boys lost their lives needlessly."
Vladimir Khokhlov, a research associate with the Central Museum of the Russian Federal Border Service, comments on the history of the conflict:
"The 1858 and 1860 treaties with a map thereto (where the border between China and Russia was drawn in red pencil as passing near the Chinese coast) did not contain a specific description of the border line. Nor was it reviewed in the Soviet era. Yet under our state border law, on navigable rivers the border passes along the fairway and on non-navigable rivers, along the median line. The Chinese laid claim to islands that were beyond the fairway."
The Moscow News (
http://english.mn.ru/english/issue.php?2003-11-12)