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Why the Russians Lifted the Blockade at Bear Island

Neville Maxwell
Fall 1978
Summary: 

In the river traffic that swings past the great Soviet city of Khabarovsk this summer, down the Amur and back up the Ussuri and in the opposite direction, there are Chinese as well as Soviet vessels. The great bulk of the traffic is Soviet: passenger ferries, freighters, barge trains loaded with raw materials, agricultural machinery and other cargo for the development of Siberia and the Soviet Far East, occasionally a rakish gunboat setting off upstream to its patrol station. But now, after a ten-year break, some Chinese ferries and cargo boats carrying coal or agricultural produce pass that way too.

Neville Maxwell is Senior Research Officer at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Oxford University, Oxford, England. He is the editor of China's Road to Development and the author of India's China War, India and the Nagas, and other works. Copyright (c) 1978, Neville Maxwell.

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