The Road to Victory

A Soviet history of the Vietnamese revolution by two Moscow specialists on Indochina, issued as the export account of the most spectacular anti-imperialist victory of the age.

Six chapters run from the proclamation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September 1945, through the war against France and the encirclement of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Geneva settlement, the American war and its defeat, the fall of Saigon in 1975 and reunification, to the founding of the Socialist Republic and the opening of its transition to socialism.

It is a partisan history and an official one, and the spine of the story it tells is one of the twentieth century's authentic epics. As the fullest continuous Soviet narrative of that thirty-year war available in English, set out from Moscow's own vantage and with its own sources, it is the standard text of its kind.

The date of the argument is 1979, not the imprint year. The final chapter carries the story past the fall of Saigon into the Third Indochina War: the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge in January 1979 and the proclamation of the People's Republic of Kampuchea, then the Chinese invasion across the length of the Vietnamese border on 17 February 1979, with Brezhnev's reply of 3 March quoted. This was finalised in the spring of 1979, at the moment the Sino-Soviet split turned into open war between communist states, and it takes its side without hesitation.

Companion volume to the Laos material drafted the same year.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.