Communism and History in Vietnam

Abstract

Communism was merely another of the foreign systems trying to take its place on the Vietnamese scene. The Vietnamese publications have ranged from articles debating the roles of individuals and events in Vietnamese history to those researching particular historical points, from books describing centuries of development to valuable and detailed monographs on major events in the nation's history. The chief concerns in Vietnamese Communist historiography have paralleled the goals of the same years--independence, unity, and socialism for Vietnam. The Vietnamese Communists, like their Russian colleagues, rejected a universal, deterministic, gradualist emphasis for an indigenous, voluntaristic, immediate focus, though without the attendant Stalinist violence. The problem of external causation in Chinese history is easily countered on the Vietnamese side as they stress the continued development of the Vietnamese people. The Vietnamese, on the other hand, have identified strongly with past rebellions, especially the great Tay-son revolt of the late eighteenth century.