Ho Chi Minh

A popular biography of Ho Chi Minh by a Soviet Vietnamologist who had been there.

Kobelev tells the reader in his first paragraph that he was in Vietnam as a TASS correspondent while the country was under American attack, and describes reaching Vinh in June 1965 under bombing, waiting for nightfall at river crossings, with anti-aircraft fire so loud his party could not hear one another. That establishes at the outset that the author had been in the country, spoken to people there, and cared about them.

It follows the life from the village childhood and the years at sea, through Paris and the petition to Versailles, Moscow and Canton, the founding of the party, the years in China and the return in 1941, the August revolution and the declaration of independence, the war against France, and the long war that followed.

It is a popular biography rather than a monograph, working from Vietnamese official memoir literature and from the author's own reporting, with no bibliography and only a handful of source footnotes.

The copyright page carries two dates, and they are the most informative thing on it. The Russian original was cleared for the press by the Komsomol's publishing house in 1983, under Andropov; the English translation appeared six years later, months before the Berlin Wall came down. Nothing in the text was revised for the later reader.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.