The Road to Victory is a Soviet history of the Vietnamese revolution, written by two Moscow specialists on Indochina, I. Divilkovsky and A. Ognetov, and issued in English by Progress Publishers as the export account of the most spectacular anti-imperialist victory of the age. Its 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 the reunification of the country, to the founding of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the opening of what the book calls its "transition to socialism." It is a partisan history and an official one — the enemy is always "the imperialists," "the puppet regime," "the Peking hegemonists"; the Party is always wise; the Soviet Union is always the disinterested friend — but the spine of the story it tells is one of the twentieth century's authentic epics, and any criticism that forgets that has disqualified itself before it begins. The questions to put to the book are therefore not only the usual ones about what it falsifies, though it falsifies a great deal. They are also: what does its own theory commit it to, what has the passage of time done to its central prediction, and whose graves lie under the road whose victory it celebrates.
The date of the argument is 1979, not the 1980 of the spine. The English translation is copyright Progress 1980, but the text must be read by the latest events it treats, and those events are very late. The final chapter carries the story past the fall of Saigon into the Third Indochina War: it hails the "revolutionary, patriotic forces of Kampuchea" who in January 1979 "toppled the pro-Peking regime of Pol Poth and Jeng Sary and proclaimed the formation of the People's Republic of Kampuchea" — that is, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia — and it describes how "On February 17, 1979 Chinese troops, supported by armor and artillery, swarmed across the entire length of the Vietnam border," quoting Brezhnev's speech of 3 March 1979 in reply. This is a book finalised in the spring of 1979, at the exact moment the Sino-Soviet split turned into open war between communist states, and it takes its side without a flicker of hesitation. Progress's decision to send it abroad the following year is itself the commission: with China lost to "Maoism" and Vietnam and Laos bound to Moscow, the Soviet Union was presenting reunified Vietnam as the showcase of its export doctrine — a war-ruined peasant nation passing directly to socialism under Soviet guidance, living proof of what Soviet theory called the advance "to socialism bypassing the stage of capitalist development." It is, in this, the companion volume to Kaysone Phomvihane's Revolution in Laos, also drafted in 1979 and also published by the Soviet state press in 1980–81; the two books share a tradition, a theory, a patron and a war, and they should be read together.
The liberation struggle this book narrates was real, protracted, and waged against overwhelming force. The French did conquer Vietnam in the nineteenth century and rule it, in the book's accurate phrase, split into three — "South Vietnam, a colony, Central Vietnam, an 'empire', and North Vietnam, a protectorate" — for the benefit of Paris; the Japanese did occupy it; and on 2 September 1945 a genuine popular revolution proclaimed independence in the words the book quotes from Ho Chi Minh's Declaration: "Viet Nam has the right to be a free and independent country—and in fact it is so already." The account of the first war is sober and, in its essentials, true. The description of Dien Bien Phu — "the biggest operation carried out by the Vietnam People's Army in the war of Resistance," where "the 16 thousand French garrison was encircled" and broken in the spring of 1954 — is real military history, and the victory it records genuinely ended French rule in Indochina and shook the entire colonial system.
The book's account of the American war is, if anything, understated relative to the crime. Divilkovsky and Ognetov are right that the United States "did not stop short of employing biological, chemical and other weapons of mass annihilation"; right that General Westmoreland was given "carte blanche to wage an unlimited war of annihilation on everything living" in a five-hundred-kilometre zone, until the American press itself began writing of a "lunar landscape"; right about the saturation bombing of "rural communities and residential quarters of towns and cities, schools, hospitals, temples"; right about napalm and white phosphorus and the "mass shootings of civilians including women, children and old people"; right that the massacre at Son My — My Lai — in March 1968 "was by no means an isolated incident." A reader who came to this book knowing nothing would learn a true and terrible thing: that a poor agrarian nation survived the concentrated fury of the greatest military power on earth and defeated it, and that the reunification of a country the war had torn in two was a real and hard-won achievement. None of what follows is a denial of any of that. The critique that follows lands on the Stalinist leadership of that struggle and on the doctrine this book uses to interpret it — never on the Vietnamese people's fight, which needs no apology from anyone.
The organising idea of the book is the theory of stages, in its late-Soviet colonial dress. The revolution comes in two instalments: first a "national-liberation" or "national people's democratic revolution," completed with reunification, and then a "socialist revolution" that reaches socialism without passing through a capitalist stage. The authors state the doctrine as settled Leninism, quoting an official Vietnamese source that the country's advance is "a realization of the Leninist thesis on the feasibility of a country's advance to socialism bypassing the stage of capitalist development." Le Duan, the Party's General Secretary, supplies the exact formula in his report to the Fourth Congress: "our country is still in the middle of the transition from a society with an economy still dominated by petty-commodity production to socialism bypassing the capitalist stage of development."
This is not a Vietnamese idiosyncrasy but the central theoretical claim of the tradition this series exists to examine. The whole quarrel between Trotsky and his opponents, from 1905 onward, turned on precisely this question: whether the revolution in a backward country must pass through a discrete bourgeois-democratic stage before socialism can be posed, or whether — as the theory of permanent revolution held — the democratic and socialist tasks interpenetrate and can be carried through only by the proletariat taking power. Trotsky put the colonial case in the second thesis of The Permanent Revolution (1930) in terms that read as though written against this book: "With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses." The point of the theory was never that the stages could be legislated in advance; it was that they could not.
The apparatus the book erects on the foundation is orthodox to the letter, and it is the same apparatus, drawn from the same source, that the Laos volume erects. The Fourth Congress of December 1976 is quoted mapping "three simultaneous revolutions—one in the sphere of production relations, another in the field of science and technology, and a third one in the field of ideology and culture" — the identical "three revolutions" formula that Kaysone borrowed wholesale for Laos, here in its native Vietnamese form. The transition from "small-scale production to large-scale socialist production" is "planned by the Congress to be completed over a period of 20 years." And the doctrine of "bypassing the capitalist stage" is, again, not a local invention but the export theory of "socialist orientation" that the Soviet Union applied from Aden to Angola, and that a sibling volume in this series — the Academy of Sciences' USSR and Countries of Africa (1980) — builds on the same "non-capitalist road." The theory presents as accomplished fact exactly what permanent revolution posed as a question: whether a state can be steered to socialism from above, by a vanguard standing in for an absent proletariat and a foreign power supplying the model.
A theory that makes a prediction can be tested against what followed, and this one now can be, in a way it could not when Progress sent the book abroad. The book's last sentence is its prophecy: "the hard but glorious march executed by a free and united Vietnam down the road to socialism will culminate in as great a success as the glorious victory of the Vietnamese patriots over the imperialist aggressors." Half of that came true, and the half that did should be granted without grudging.
The national-liberation achievement was real and heroic, and it is what raises this book above propaganda. Independence from France was genuinely won — the August Revolution named the anti-colonial tasks correctly and the movement carried them through at a colossal human cost that the book does not exaggerate. Dien Bien Phu really did break French rule. The United States, the strongest power on earth, really was defeated. And in 1975 a country that war had split at the seventeenth parallel really was reunified under a single state. On the tasks it had already accomplished, the book records true history, and the framework it used named those immediate tasks correctly.
The other half — the "march down the road to socialism" that was to "culminate in as great a success" as the war — did not arrive as promised, and its failure took the exact shape the reply had named in advance. The attempt was made in earnest. In the South after 1975 the new state moved against private commerce and, in 1978, launched a forced socialist transformation: an agricultural collectivisation drive in the Mekong delta, and the nationalisation of the trade and finance that the book itself concedes were "concentrated largely in the hands of the Chinese bourgeoisie." Both met the answer such measures have always met — resistance, hoarding, flight. The transformation of the South helped drive the boat-people exodus of 1978–79, when hundreds of thousands left by sea. The economy foundered through the crisis of the bao cap, the "subsidy" years of the early 1980s, when the plan delivered shortage and inflation rather than the promised abundance. And then, at its Sixth Congress in December 1986, the very party that had proclaimed the socialist revolution adopted Đổi Mới, "renovation": decollectivisation, price liberalisation, the licensing of private enterprise, and, in 1987, a foreign-investment law among the most open in the region. It reintroduced, by deliberate policy, precisely the market and capitalist relations that the socialist stage was supposed to supersede. This was not a Vietnamese aberration but the regional and world pattern — the same turn Laos took as its New Economic Mechanism in November 1986 and the Soviet Union as perestroika.
Here, and this is where Vietnam's dossier is richer than Laos's, the Fourth International's press did not have to reason by analogy: it covered the turn directly. Writing in International Viewpoint in March 1991, Pierre Rousset described how "the key formulae of doi moi (renewal) and tu duy moi (new thought)" had opened a period of "economic liberalization" in which "the market in agricultural products is essentially free, and private commerce flourishes." His summary of the political settlement that resulted is the whole matter in a sentence: "the VCP leadership has sought to pursue liberalization on the economic plane while freezing everything on the political plane" — a bureaucratic party, its monopoly wholly intact, presiding over the reintroduction of capitalist relations within little more than a decade of victory. The tradition had restated the underlying argument through the 1980s, in the debate between Ernest Mandel and Alec Nove over market and plan (Quatrième Internationale no. 28, April–June 1988, where Mandel's "Le mythe du socialisme de marché" answered Nove's case for "feasible" market socialism) — a general theoretical reckoning, not a word of it about Vietnam, but joined at exactly the moment the bureaucratic states were reaching for the market en masse.
The verdict falls where permanent revolution said it would. Trotsky had put the general point in The Revolution Betrayed (1936): "Money cannot be arbitrarily 'abolished'," and the transitional epoch "does not mean a cutting down of trade, but, on the contrary, its extraordinary extension." A backward, war-ruined, overwhelmingly peasant country, led by a party that substituted itself for a proletariat which barely existed, could not vault into socialism by the administrative will of its cadres; the plan could not simply abolish the market it was built to replace. The book was right about the stage it had finished and wrong about the stage it foretold, and its wrongness took the very form the reply had described three decades before it happened.
A book titled The Road to Victory, opening on the revolution of September 1945, is silent on one thing above all, and the silence is total. Search its ninety thousand words and the name Trotsky does not occur once; neither does Ta Thu Thau, nor La Lutte, nor Cochinchina, nor any acknowledgement that the Vietnamese revolutionary movement of the 1930s contained a large, indigenous current that took the socialist revolution seriously and paid for it with its life. This is not an accident of a foreign author's ignorance. It is the erasure of the fact that the Party's road to victory ran, at its very starting point, over the corpses of Vietnamese revolutionaries murdered by the movement this book celebrates.
Saigon in the 1930s had one of the strongest Trotskyist movements anywhere in the colonial world. The historical facts, recorded by the movement's own survivors — the historian Ngo Van, himself of the Saigon milieu, chief among them — and reported by the Fourth International's press across four decades, are these. Around Ta Thu Thau and the newspaper La Lutte (in Vietnamese, Tranh Dau, "The Struggle"), Trotskyists and communists in Cochinchina cooperated for several years in a united front that at moments outpolled the Stalinists in Saigon municipal elections. Intercontinental Press set out the arc in September 1985: "The Struggle" group led by Ta Thu Thau, it wrote, "which was later recognized (in 1939) as the Vietnamese section of the Fourth International — worked closely with the Indochinese Communist Party in southern Vietnam from early 1933 through mid-1937," until the alliance broke apart on the eve of the war. In one of the ironies the official history cannot afford to record, Ta Thu Thau was jailed in 1937 "by the 'democratic' Popular Front government of French imperialism" — a French Popular Front in which the Communists sat.
Then, in the autumn of 1945, as the August Revolution unfolded and the Trotskyists pressed to arm the workers' committees and carry the revolution beyond its bourgeois-democratic limits, the Viet Minh turned on them and killed them. Ta Thu Thau was arrested in the south-central provinces as he travelled from Hanoi back to Saigon and, in the words of the same account, "tried and acquitted three times by local People's Committees in Quang Ngai province, but subsequently was murdered nonetheless." He was one of hundreds. Intercontinental Press stated it plainly in April 1979: "Dozens of Trotskyists who opposed this were massacred by the VCP, including the popular Trotskyist leader Ta Thu Thau."
This is not a retrospective charge invented by later critics. The Fourth International named the murders as they became known and mourned Ta Thu Thau as one of its own. Its International Executive Committee, in an appeal "Against the War in Indo-China!" printed in Fourth International in June 1947, wrote that the Indo-Chinese section, "on the morrow of the country's 'Liberation' and at the very beginning of the Indochinese revolution, was deprived by the criminal hands of Stalin's GPU of many of its leading elements, among them the heroic figure of comrade Ta-Thu-Thau" — and in the same breath sent its "fraternal greetings to the courageous fighters of Viet-Nam." At its Second World Congress in 1948 the International called for a minute of silence for its martyrs and read his name into the roll alongside Trotsky's own; and it listed him again in October 1978 among the movement's murdered founders, "Ta Thu Thau from Vietnam," beside Blasco (Tresso) of Italy and Pouliopoulos of Greece. The point is exact and it belongs at the front of any honest reckoning with this book: the revolutionaries who took permanent revolution seriously in Vietnam itself were not refuted by the Party whose victory The Road to Victory narrates. They were killed by it, and then written out of the history.
Elsewhere the book's method is not silence but transfiguration — the awkward fact named and turned inside out, which, as this series has found repeatedly, produces a falsifiable claim harder to defend than any omission. Three cases stand out.
The ethnic-Chinese question is the sharpest. The book does not hide the 1978 nationalisation of Southern commerce; it defends it, and blames its consequences on Peking. "Seizing upon the quite legitimate nationalization by the SRV government of large-scale private trade in South Vietnam which was concentrated largely in the hands of the Chinese bourgeoisie," it writes, "Peking leaders launched a campaign of crude slander," and Peking's agents then "force[d] by a combination of fraud and threats many of them to abandon their jobs... and go to China." In this telling the expropriation is legitimate, the exodus is Chinese subversion, and the tens of thousands who drowned at sea do not appear at all — the word for the sea exodus, the boat people, is nowhere in the book. Here the Fourth International's press is the corrective, and it is a fair one, because it was in no way hostile to Vietnam. Intercontinental Press covered the exodus week by week through 1979, dated the decisive act — "It was only in March 1978 that capitalism was overturned in South Vietnam, notably with the expropriation of the ethnic Chinese bourgeoisie which controlled commerce" — and spent most of its energy attacking the imperialist and Chinese hypocrisy that exploited the tragedy. But even while defending Hanoi, it would not print the book's whitewash: "There are too many indications," it conceded in July 1979, "that there was an aspect of racism in the policy followed toward the ethnic Chinese." That concession, from a sympathetic source, is precisely what the book's phrase "quite legitimate" is constructed to deny.
The re-education camps are handled by euphemism, exactly as the Laos volume rendered its camps "seminars." Former soldiers and officials of the Saigon regime, the book says, were subject to "registration," and "the former employees of the puppet administration and personnel of the puppet army following re-education were involved in work for the common good"; by the elections of 1976, it adds, "95 per cent of all those who had undergone political re-education had been given the right to vote." Behind that benign formula lay a network of camps in which many thousands were held for years without trial. A book that dwells for chapters on the crimes of the enemy has, for the treatment of the defeated by the victor, only the vocabulary of civic improvement.
By contrast, the two events on which the book might have been expected to fall silent — the invasion of Cambodia and the war with China — it does not conceal at all; it transfigures them into their opposites, and takes Hanoi's side as completely as the Laos book did. The overthrow of the Khmer Rouge becomes a spontaneous liberation by "the revolutionary, patriotic forces of Kampuchea," the Vietnamese army offstage; China's assault is "aggression" pure and simple, its own two-year record of pressure on Vietnam the sole cause. On the merits of the quarrel the Fourth International was in many respects closer to Hanoi than to Peking or Phnom Penh; the point here is not that the book took the wrong side but that on every question dividing the communist world it took Moscow's side and Hanoi's without a trace of the independent deliberation a sovereign account would show — the same tutelage, dressed as "proletarian internationalism," that runs through the Laos volume.
The deepest question to put to a Marxist-Leninist text is not how loudly it denounces its enemies but whether its own categories can ever be turned on itself. The Road to Victory is a narrative history rather than a work of doctrine, so it does not run on the vocabulary of "opportunism" and "revisionism" that this series meets in the philosophical volumes — the words scarcely appear. But the reflexive test applies to its central category all the same. The book invokes "the dictatorship of the proletariat" as the essence of the new state, and insists throughout on "the leading role of the working class" and "the alliance between the working class and the peasantry" — in a country that was, as a matter of plain historical fact, overwhelmingly peasant, its industrial proletariat a small minority even in the North and thinner still in the newly conquered South. Where Kaysone's Laos volume was at least candid that its "working class was weak" to the point of near-non-existence, Divilkovsky and Ognetov never concede the difficulty; they simply assert the proletarian character of a peasant revolution. A dictatorship exercised in the name of a class that barely exists, by a party that identifies itself with that class by fiat, is the permanent problem permanent revolution named: the substitution of party for class does not dissolve the question of who actually rules a society; it conceals it. Nowhere does the book entertain the possibility that a one-party state built in the name of an almost non-existent proletariat, with no institutions of workers' democracy, might be not the instrument of the working class but a stratum standing above it. The category faces outward only — at imperialists, puppets, hegemonists, the exploiting classes. It is never once turned inward. That refusal is not a matter of a word; it is the exact blind spot that the decade after 1979 filled in, when the party that had abolished the market restored it while keeping every lever of political power in its own hands.
Read as history, The Road to Victory is a genuine, partisan record of one of the great anti-colonial endurance feats of the century, and the fight it narrates deserves every ounce of the honour the authors pay it. Read as theory, it is a clear statement of the doctrine of stages in its Soviet colonial form, offered as settled Leninism at the very moment — 1979 — when the events that would refute it were already in motion. Its value to a critical reader lies in that coincidence: it lets you watch the theory this series was founded to contest applied to a real country at the peak of its confidence, and then, in the decade that followed, watch that theory's central promise fail, the announced march to socialism ending in Đổi Mới and the return of the market, exactly as the tradition of permanent revolution had warned it must. And it lets you measure the book against the graves it steps over: the Vietnamese revolutionaries whose own road to socialism the Party closed with a bullet in 1945, and whom the Fourth International, alone, refused to forget. Between the book's account of the road to victory and that one, the reader now has both, and can decide whose road it was.