pp. 139-141 |
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brief excerpt of the content:
Ho Chi Minh has remained a shadowy
individual for a long time. Vietnamese official chronicles tend to eulogize him
as a statesman totally devoted to the reunification and independence of his
country. These accounts offer few details about Ho Chi Minh’s private emotions
and life and are intended to preserve Ho’s official image as “Uncle Ho,” a
selfless national leader completely dedicated to the interests and well-being
of his compatriots. Ho Chi Minh’s detractors, however, tend to condemn him as a
brutal, cold-blooded dictator intent on imposing a Stalinist gulag on Vietnam. Pierre
Brocheux’s biography, first published in French in 2003, is scholarly and
judicious and is a much-needed antidote to the prejudiced and stereotyped views
of Ho Chi Minh. Brocheux has made good use of the Vietnamese and Chinese
documents available up to 2003 to craft a balanced, convincing portrait of Ho
Chi Minh.
Echoing the judgment of William Duiker (an earlier biographer of Ho
Chi Minh), who called Ho “half Lenin and half Gandhi,” Brocheux also compares
Ho Chi Minh to Gandhi, praising both men for possessing “the same calm
audacity” (p. 178) to demand independence from colonial powers. What motivated
Ho Chi Minh? On this critical question, Brocheux’s answer is insightful. He
attributes Ho’s activities to two intellectual wellsprings: Confucian humanism
and Marxist-Leninist Communism. According to Brocheux, “Ho was also steeped in
the perennial Sino-Vietnamese philosophy that blended Confucianism . . . with
Buddhism and Taoism. In sum, Ho retained his original education and then
closely linked it with Leninist theory, which essentially defines the strategy
and tactics of revolution and the taking of political power” (pp. 185–186).
Brocheux’s analysis of the impact of
the Sino-Soviet split on the leadership of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP)
is fascinating. He demonstrates that the Sino-Soviet dispute triggered intense
debate within the VWP Politburo about the correct position to assume and that
Ho Chi Minh preferred to maintain an equal balance between China and the Soviet
Union. In the early 1960s, according to Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh and his
confidence man, Vo Nguyen Giap, were actually relegated to the sidelines by the
leading trio of Le Duan, Le Duc Tho, and Nguyen Chi Thanh, who controlled the
Politburo. Citing Chinese sources, Brocheux describes the Chinese reaction to
Ho Chi Minh’s mediation effort in the Sino-Soviet rift: Liu Shaoqi criticized
Ho as a “rightist.”
The lack of further documents
renders some of Brocheux’s treatments fragmentary and incomplete. For instance,
he mentions that Ho Chi Minh’s last trip to the Soviet Union was in 1961, but
he does not explain the purposes and results of the visit.
Since the original publication of
Brocheux’s volume in 2003, fresh documents have emerged from the archives of
the former Communist governments in Eastern Europe. These materials shed new
light on the dilemma that the VWP confronted when the Sino-Soviet quarrel
escalated and on the marginalization of Ho Chi Minh within the VWP ruling
circle. On the issue of Ho Chi Minh’s last trip to the Soviet Union in 1961,
which Brocheux mentions but fails to elaborate, new East European documents
provide clues. According to recently declassified Albanian documents (as
translated and published in the Cold War International History Project
Bulletin), Ho Chi Minh traveled to Moscow in the summer of 1961 to mediate the
Soviet-Albanian dispute. The Chinese opposed Ho’s efforts, blaming him for not
standing firm against Soviet revisionism. Ho’s 1961 Moscow journey was a
continuation of his attempt to restore unity within the international Communist
camp, a project that he launched in the summer of 1960 when he visited both
China and the Soviet Union in an attempt to patch up the differences between
the two Communist giants. The Albanian documents indicate that the Chinese were
fully aware of the split within the VWP leadership on the issue of...
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