Vietnam. Le communisme vietnamien (1919–1991): Construction d'un État-nation entre Moscou et Pékin. By Céline Marangé. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2012. Pp. 567. Appendices, Notes, Bibliography, Chronology, Index.

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Le communisme vietnamien (1919-1991.): Construction d'un Etat-nation entre Moscou et Pekin By CELINE MARANGE Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2012. Pp. 567. Appendices, Notes, Bibliography, Chronology, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463413000799 Celine Marange's study of Vietnamese communism (in French) is an ambitious, largely successful work that demonstrates familiarity with a broad range of sources. Using documents and memoirs from Vietnam, China, Russia, and France, she presents a long-term analysis of Vietnam's unique brand of communism. She sets out to avoid the cliches and Manichean view that have often marked our picture of this phenomenon. Her stated goal is to examine the problem of the export and adoption of communist political models, as well as the sources of political hegemony. Overall she succeeds in demonstrating 'the limits of Soviet and Chinese influence in Vietnam' (p. 30). Marange warns against the temptation to view Vietnamese communism as simply 'a foreign graft' or to 'exaggerate the possibilities for action of the Comintern and the Soviet authorities' (p. 33). This warning applies to both the early days of party building and the period when the communists held power, after 1945. The distance from Moscow, the slowness of communications and the secrecy of the Vietnamese comrades meant that there was room for improvisation for a leader such as Ho Chi Minh, willing to combine aspects of Confucianism with Leninist theory. Decades after Ho's early training of cadres, the Vietnamese took advantage of the competition between the Soviets and Chinese, who were wing for leadership of the world revolution, to make their own decisions on the conduct of their war. This is not to claim that the communist system developed in Hanoi was uninfluenced by Soviet or Chinese models--but as Marange explains, the 'appropriation of the Soviet model grew out of the desire of the new political elite' (p. 33). Starting with Ho Chi Minh in 1923-4, and moving on to the more fully indoctrinated Western-educated communists of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the leftist anticolonialists viewed the role of international communism as the provision of funds and organising methods to create an independent socialist state. Ideological purity and faithfulness to the current party line became the yardstick by which party leaders were measured by their own countrymen; battles for power from the 1930s to at least the 1980s were waged on the pretext that the opposing faction was deviating too far from orthodox Marxism-Leninism. In the 1950s-60s, with large numbers of Vietnamese studying in both the PRC and the Soviet Union, the military, police, cultural, and political institutions all were closely patterned on Chinese and Soviet models. After 1985, however, as the party elite grew larger and began to accumulate wealth, their promotion of the Soviet-style state, with a communist monopoly on power enshrined in the constitution, became as much a matter of self-interest as ideological conviction. The drawback of such a lengthy compendium of information from different periods and sources (the style of the French Ph.D. dissertation) is that the research is likely to be uneven. The reader in this case is presented with a large amount of detail; some political theory, some international history; without much indication as to what the major arguments are in the historiography, either Vietnamese or foreign. What might have helped to create a more coherent book would have been an introduction to explain how the author approached her sources and what her major challenges were. Which of the available sources did she find most reliable, where did she find gaps or contradictions in the picture; why did she make certain choices (e. …