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. They joined the Special Purpose Motorized Rifle Brigade and fought shoulder to shoulder with Soviet soldiers and other foreign communists. 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 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.