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After the first Indochina War in 1950, the Soviet Union was the first country, along with its satellite states in Eastern Europe, to diplomatically recognize the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The Soviet Union lobbied the Viet Minh delegation to accept partition of the country as a compromise solution to the conflict at the 1954 Geneva Conference. Later, in 1964. When the war in Vietnam began to escalate in the mid 1960s, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin visited Hanoi to try to dissuade the North Vietnamese from escalating the War against South Vietnam and the United States. But in spite of this, the USSR remained one of Vietnam's strongest allies and offered crucial military aid to North Vietnam during the war.
Soviet ships in the South China Sea gave early warnings to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces in South Vietnam. The Soviet intelligence ships would spot American B-52 bombers flying from Okinawa and Guam and would relay this information to the Central Office for South Vietnam, North Vietnam's southern headquarters. From this, the North Vietnamese analysts could calculate what the bombing targets would be and advise any forces in the vicinity to move away from the site of the intended attack. These advance warnings limited the damage to buildings but prevented the death of many military or civilian leaders in the headquarters.
The Soviet Union also supplied North Vietnam with medical supplies, arms, tanks, planes, helicopters, artillery, anti-aircraft missiles and other military equipment. Soviet crews fired Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles at U.S. F-4 Phantoms, which were shot down over Thanh Hóa in 1965. Some Soviet soldiers lost their lives in this conflict. It was later acknowleged that the Soviet Union had stationed up to 3,000 troops in Vietnam during the war.
Between 1953 and 1991, the hardware donated by the Soviet Union included 2,000 tanks, 1,700 APCs, 7,000 artillery guns, over 5,000 anti-aircraft guns, 158 surface-to-air missile launchers, and 120 helicopters. During the war, the Soviets sent North Vietnam annual arms shipments worth $450 million. Soviet military schools and academies began training Vietnamese soldiers—in all more than 10,000 military personnel.
The KGB had also helped develop the signals intelligence capabilities for the North Vietnamese. This was done by way of an operation known as Vostok. The Vostok program was a counterintelligence and espionage program used to detect CIA and South Vietnamese commando teams sent into North Vietnam. Many of these teams were discovered and captured. The Soviets helped the Ministry of Public Security using espionage through which foreign diplomats among the Western-allies of the US were recruited and thousands of high-level documents including targets of B-52 strikes were obtained and passed on to the North Vietnamese. Through this program, it was learned in 1975, that the US would not intervene to save South Vietnam from collapse.
In a meeting held on June 23, 1967 between Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin and President Lyndon B. Johnson, the two men discussed the ongoing crisis in the Middle East and the Soviet-US arms race. But near the end of the meeting, Johnson said he was willing to discuss a peace settlement regarding war in Vietnam. He proposed dividing the country in half, one part communist another part capitalist. He assured Kosygin that the only reason for American bombing in North Vietnam was because of North Vietnamese intervention into South Vietnam. Johnson offered the Soviets the chance to supervise the democratic election in South Vietnam in the aftermath of the war. Kosygin was uninterested, likely knowing that the war was not going well for the Americans. He responded by changing the subject back to the crisis in the Middle East.
When the two men met again in their afternoon meeting, Kosygin told Johnson that he was recently in contact with Phạm Văn Đồng, the Prime Minister of North Vietnam, and that they had discussed the possibilities on putting an end to the war. The North Vietnamese reply came during Kosygin's lunch with Johnson. Kosygin made it very clear that the North Vietnamese would not give up their goal of a unified Vietnam. Kosygin went on to assure Johnson however that a North Vietnamese delegation could meet anywhere in the world to discuss a peace settlement with the Americans.
A policy of detente between the Americans and the Soviets would follow under Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon. That will be explored in greater detail in a later entry in this series.
After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the Soviet Union became a benefactor to Vietnam during the 1980s until the USSR collapsed in 1991, leaving Vietnam with a weakened ally. Vietnam subsequently embraced a "socialist-oriented market economy" along with Asian and Western investment over the past two decades.