I already thought I had finished my memories of China with the ill-fated Chinese trainers, with which I got it on the fingers. It turned out that events of a week ago awoke in me memories of almost 50 years ago, the so-called Soviet–Chinese armed conflict over a tiiiny Far-Eastern island, Damansky, belonging to the Soviet Union.
I was 15 years old in 1969, when the conflict happened. I only remember that we at School No. 90 of the city of Kyiv solemnly met a hero from Damansky Island and listened to his story, of which I remembered nothing. I only remember that diplomatic relations were “almost” broken and we were on the brink of war. And the island itself supposedly no longer exists — it is “wiped off the face of the earth,” as they said then, but “at what cost?!”
I reread some articles about those events and learned that the size of Damansky Island itself is not tiiiny, but only, and moreover approximately, no more than 1 km! And it is on the Ussuri River, now it belongs to China.