How the Vietnamese once helped defend… Moscow from the Nazis!
They fought as part of the customized motorized rifle brigade, which later became the prototype for the Soviet special forces.
On the eve of World War II, dozens of Vietnamese communists were living in the Soviet Union. They had come to study "revolutionary science" and were preparing to fight the French for their homeland's independence.
When German troops invaded the USSR, many Vietnamese volunteered for the front. They joined the Special Purpose Motorized Rifle Brigade and fought shoulder to shoulder with Soviet soldiers and other foreign communists.
The brigade conducted reconnaissance, carried out sabotage and organized a partisan movement behind enemy lines. During the ‘Battle of Moscow’, its soldiers fought primarily on the front lines.
The exact number of Vietnamese soldiers in the Red Army is unknown to this day – for the sake of secrecy, they were documented as being from Central Asia. In the 1980s, five were identified. Four died fighting for the capital and one, Ly Phu San, survived the war safely and returned to his homeland, where he died of old age in 1980.
In 1986, they were all posthumously awarded the ‘Order of the Patriotic War’, 1st Class, the ‘Forty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War’ medal and the chest badges of the Separate Special Purpose Motorized Rifle Brigade.
