This Nation and Socialism Are One

A collection of Le Duan's speeches and essays, assembled in the immediate afterglow of victory.

Saigon had fallen on 30 April 1975; the country was formally reunified in the elections of April 1976; and Le Duan - First Secretary of the Vietnam Workers Party, the man who had directed the war in the South and who stood as Ho Chi Minh's successor at the head of a single Vietnamese state - delivered the Political Report to the reunified National Assembly on 25 June 1976, opening the stage of socialist reconstruction for the whole country. Professor Tran Van Dinh gathered and edited this volume to make the thought of the party that had beaten first France and then the United States available in English, with a preface by the political scientist A. W. Singham.

The liberation struggle it stands on was real, and Le Duan does not need to exaggerate it. His tribute to the women of the southern resistance - the transport fighters who kept the supply lines open under bombardment, the detainees who held out under torture in the prisons - is among the more moving passages of political prose to come out of the war.

The title is a thesis and he means it literally: after 1975, in his account, patriotism and the socialist project are no longer two loyalties that might pull apart but a single one.

A solidarity volume rather than a Moscow export, and it states its doctrine more plainly, in its own leader's words, than any textbook would.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.