“The smell of fried meat still wafts over Damansky Island.” This is exactly the message that was heard on Radio Liberty on March 17, 1969. What happened in March 1969 in distant Ussuri? How did it happen that two ideologically close countries brought the world to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe? The most incredible rumors circulated about these events in the USSR - they whispered that after the shelling of the Grads, half of Damansky Island went under water, that our troops used combat lasers against the Chinese, etc. In the “shadow” of Damansky there remained other Soviet-Chinese clashes of 1969 - near the village of Dulaty and on Lake Zhalanashkol, where the Maoists again violated the border, but were driven back to their territory with losses. Being a direct participant in these events, having access to the most closed and classified information, the author reconstructs the course of the Soviet-Chinese conflict in every detail, assessing the tactics, level of combat training and real losses of the parties.