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Leninism in Hanoi. - Review - book review
National Review, Oct 23, 2000 by John Derbyshire
Be that as it may, Ho kept his position as leader of his country's Communists by dogged adherence to the principles he had first absorbed in 1920. (Though also, it must be said, by luck: He was out of Vietnam on all of the many occasions when the French police did a sweep of radical patriots. As Duiker rather delicately puts it, "He was an unwitting beneficiary of the thoroughness of the Surete.") Whenever considerations of pure ideology came into conflict with the great project of expelling the foreigners and unifying the nation, ideology was set aside. In Duiker's words: "There seems little doubt that for Ho Chi Minh the survival of his country was first and always his primary concern. Indeed, such views aroused the suspicion of other senior Party leaders in Hanoi, Beijing and Moscow, who sometimes questioned whether Ho was a genuine Marxist."
This presumably accounts for the way Ho was treated by Stalin and Mao. When Ho visited Moscow in 1950, Stalin's attitude to his guest was, according to Khrushchev, "offensive" and "infuriating." Mao was very little better. Having convinced himself that war with the U.S. was inevitable and might break out anywhere on China's borders, Mao looked on Vietnam as a useful buffer state, another Korea. Ho returned the slight, regarding the Chinese with great wariness; one of the constant themes of Vietnam's history has been resistance to Chinese domination.
Ho's colleagues, however, were deeply impressed by the success of the Communists in China, and at their Third National Conference in 1950 swung away from Ho's longstanding policy of putting national unification first. Campaigns were launched to introduce the "masses" to the ideas and practices of Maoism-"class struggle" and so on. This conference was held in Ho's absence, probably because of growing doubts both in the international movement and among his own colleagues about Ho's commitment to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Ho never again had supremacy in his politburo. He was too much the elder statesman of Vietnamese Communism to be set aside, though, and his influence actually may have softened some of the social policies embarked on in the 1950s-the savage "land reform" campaigns of 1955, for example, which were also carried out under the poisonous influence of Chinese advisers.
Duiker was a foreign-service officer in Saigon during the Vietnam war, and thereafter taught history at Penn State. His book has been 30 years in the making, and is a monument to diligent research. From the evidence he has presented, his inferences seem to me logically sound. On areas in which I have some specialist knowledge, however, Duiker sometimes left me feeling mildly uneasy. It is, for example, odd to see Osip Mandelstam referred to (twice) as "a journalist" and the Chinese essayist Lu Xun as "a poet." Mandelstam did some reporting and Lu wrote some verses, but that is not what either is remembered for. Nor does the Chinese word tao mean "apple"; it means "peach"and so on.
