In Surabaya, you can visit a museum inside a former Soviet submarine for a small fee. It served in the Indonesian Navy for almost 30 years, but you can still spot Russian writing on it.

The Soviets weren't supplying weapons for nothing: Indonesia was trying to seize West New Guinea from the Netherlands through military force. Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs about how Soviet military personnel participated in Operation Trikora. Though technically as "volunteers" wearing Indonesian uniforms. I never thought the Soviets basically went to war with the Netherlands. To prevent Soviet influence from growing, the US forced the Netherlands to sign a devastating New York Agreement, under which the disputed territory came under UN administration and later fell under full Indonesian control.

However, all Soviet efforts to cement its influence turned out to be in vain. Just a few years after victory, a coup happened, and the new Indonesian government, backed by the US, essentially wiped out virtually all communists and their sympathizers, banning the communist party. Half a million to a million people were killed. Years later, leftists in Latin America would be threatened with settling disputes using the "Jakarta method," and in 2020 an American journalist published a book by that name about US government involvement in mass murders of communists.

By the early 1980s, Soviet equipment acquired during friendlier times was deteriorating, and they needed to find replacements. One option was cooperation with Israel—which, by the way, Indonesia still doesn't recognize. They bought fighter jets from this "non-existent country." But you can't just buy them like that: you need to train the pilots. They had to pull off an entire secret operation: the pilots were taken to Israel, where they posed as Singaporean pilots, and even learned "I'm a pilot from Singapore" in Hebrew to avoid suspicion. Right after that, they went to a US military base in Arizona to get fake certificates, as if they'd trained on American fighter jets.