Nhan Dan, the official North Vietnamese government newspaper, carried a front-page editorial on 22 December commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of Stalin. According to a report in the December 23 Washington Post, the Vietnamese described the late dictator as "an eminent Marxist-Leninist theoretician, great leader of the Soviet Union and the world Communist movement".
The Nhan Dan editorial reportedly said that Stalin was Lenin's "disciple, comrade-in-arms and successor" and that he "waged an unremitting struggle to preserve the purity of Marxism-Leninism and develop its creative power" while opposing "opportunism under all forms".
Nhan Dan urged the "entire Vietnamese party, army and people" to learn from Stalin's "revolutionary spirit".
Even Pravda, in its December 21 editorial on Stalin's birth, included criticism of his "unjustified repression" of the Soviet people, although the Soviet led paper painted a more favourable [illegible] of Stalin than at any time since the Krushchev revelations in 1956.
It can hardly be supposed that the North Vietnamese leaders are unaware of the truth about Stalin. Lenin, rather than regarding him as his "disciple, comrade-in-arms, and successor", demanded that the party remove Stalin as general secretary. After Lenin's death, Stalin became the spokesman for the privileged bureaucratic caste that suppressed every expression of proletarian democracy in the Soviet Union and murdered virtually all of Lenin's closest collaborators.
Instead of opposing "opportunism under all forms", it was Stalin who made "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism a central tenet of the Communist International in place of Lenin's policy of advancing revolutionary struggles.
The Vietnamese people have had bitter experiences with Stalinism. After World War II, when the French sought to reoccupy IndoChina and crush the new Viet Minh regime, the French Communist Party—then, as now, one of the most servilely pro-Moscow CPs in the world—supported the de Gaulle regime against the Vietnamese.
The French CP was, in fact, in the government, and in March 1947 all the Communist cabinet ministers voted to support the military expedition. Maurice Thorez, then head of the Communist Party and a vice-premier, personally signed the military orders... L'Humanite, the French CP newspaper, although it formally called for negotiations with Ho Chi Minh's government, declared in the July 24, 1946 issue, that it did not wish to see France reduced to "its own small metropolitan territory..."
"Are we," L'Humanite added, "after having lost Syria and Lebanon yesterday, to lose IndoChina tomorrow, north Africa the day after?"
In 1954, after the French had been decisively defeated at Dienbienphu, Stalin's immediate successors and their Chinese counterparts insisted that the victorious Viet Minh accept the extremely disadvantageous terms proposed by the French and their American allies: that the Viet Minh withdraw north of the seventeenth parallel and turn the south over to the French puppet emperor Bao Dai, thus setting the stage for the present American intervention in support of an "independent" South Vietnamese regime.
Tillman Durdin, writing from Geneva in the July 24, 1954 New York Times, said: "Evidence has accumulated here that Viet Minh leaders are not entirely happy about the peace settlement for Vietnam. A number of members of the Vietnam delegation have declared openly that pressure from Chinese Communist Premier Chou En Lai and Soviet Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov [to this day a die-hard defender of Stalin's record] forced their regime to accept less than it rightly should have obtained here."
It must be recognised, of course, that the Vietnamese leaders are under heavy pressure from both Moscow and Peking, which control the major sources of arms for the freedom fighters in South Vietnam. Neither of the bureaucratic giants would hesitate for a moment to cut off even the small flow of aid they have granted the Vietnamese if political concessions were not forthcoming.
The fact that the Hanoi leaders feel it necessary to pay such blackmail (or to hail Stalin for reasons of their own) does not lessen the duty of revolutionists throughout the world to actively demonstrate their solidarity with the Vietnamese revolution and to do everything within their power to force the United States to withdraw all its troops at once from Vietnam.
At the same time, it must be stated that putting Stalin in a place of honour injures the Vietnamese revolution. Stalinism has accurately been described as the syphilis of the labour movement. Millions of people who are opposed to what U.S. imperialism is doing in Vietnam can become uncertain and even more accessible to imperialist propaganda if Hanoi fails to recognise where Stalin stands in informed public opinion internationally today.