Foreign Policy Blogs

Red Square/Red River: the Soviet Spectres of Vietnam

le-nin

While readers were merrily gorging themselves on turkey dinners, FPA Russia Blog spent the past week hard at work: sniffing out traces of Soviet heritage in Hanoi, the capital of one of the world’s last remaining Socialist states.

Indeed, most middle aged Hanoians speak at least some Russian, and many experience full-on Ostalgie for the GDR, where thousands of Vietnamese professionals were sent on scholarships or as guest workers (An expat who writes for a German magazine told me that his credentials do wonders for access to Vietnamese officials nostalgic for their time in East Germany).

In fact, according to William Logan’s excellent book Hanoi: Biography of a City, between 1965 and 1990, over 30000 Vietnamese students were sent to Eastern Europe, and and returned to number 30% of all Hanoi university professors. “Russian, Polish, German and Czech replaced French as second languages”, he writes.

sovietcongGodard’s film Sympathy for the Devil shows the letters S and O spraypainted in front of the word ‘Vietcong’ to make ‘Sovietcong’.  But the USSR’s ‘special relationship’ with Vietnam began long before the shipments of MiGs and anti-aircraft guns during the war: Ho Chi Minh had travelled to Russia many times in the 1920s to attend meetings of the Communist International. Until 1990,the USSR remained Vietnam’s closest ally.

But the Vietnamese revolutionaries, and later state planners, were anything but Soviet stooges: pragmatists adept at what Logan called ‘bending with the wind’, they would initially acquiesce to Soviet guidance but then do things their own way. On top of that, the past 20 years have seen Vietnam embrace its own Perestroika and open up to the west, further eroding the Soviet links.

But I was still able to locate some lovely gems, despite the unjustifiable absence of a Soviet-Era Walking Trail from my Lonely Planet guidebook.

1) Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and Museum

Embalming dead revolutionaries was one of the Soviet Union’s strongest cultural exports, and Vietnam was no exception. So, despite Ho Chi Minh’s stated desire to be cremated, he was given the full Lenin treatment by Soviet taxidermists and now lies in state in a marble mausoleum, designed by Soviet architects.

ho-chi-minh-museum1In fact, so well was Uncle Ho (as he is known even officially in Vietnam) recently ‘touched up’ in Moscow that ‘Vietnam has awarded medals to the Russian embalmers and scientists who have helped preserve the body of revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh since he died 40 years ago’, reports Reuters.

The Ho Chi Minh museum, designed by Isakovich, Ryavkin, Zabolotskaya et al, presumably with the original intention of housing a Bond villain, is pure, unadulturated brutalist joy.

2) Young Pioneers:   even the uniforms  remain unchanged!young-pioneers1

3) Soviet Machinery

Imagine my disappointment at the relative paucity of Ladas and other Soviet rustbuckets on streets teeming with blandly reliable Japanese imports! Jeremy Clarkson has a rather uncharitable idea about why that might be the case, but the biggest building sites still rely on hefty Kamaz trucks, the airport and freight companies use Zils, the army holds on to their trusty UAZ jeeps, and Hanoi boasts a bizarre cult of the Minsk motorcycle.

lenin-statue-hanoi4) Lenin statue with idiosynchratic spellings: speaks for itself

5) Soviet T-54 tank and MiG 21 have pride of place at the War Museum

6) The amazing Soviet-Vietnamese Friendship Cultural Palace. This hulking concrete megalith co-designed by Natasha Sulimova, complete with anodysed gold windows and a revolutionary sculpture out front, is maybe supposed to vaguely resemble a hulking concrete and metal pagoda. In an apt illustration of Vietnam’s shifting orientation from following in Russia’s footsteps to looking towards Japan and the Asian Tigers, last week the formerly Soviet centre hosted a Japanese dance troupe for which the opening act consisted of two life-sized domestic robots. The crowd was ecstatic.

 

Author

Vadim Nikitin

Vadim Nikitin was born in Murmansk, Russia and grew up there and in Britain. He graduated from Harvard University with a thesis on American democracy promotion in Russia. Vadim's articles about Russia have appeared in The Nation, Dissent Magazine, and The Moscow Times. He is currently researching a comparative study of post-Soviet and post-Apartheid nostalgia.
Areas of Focus:
USSR; US-Russia Relations; Culture and Society; Media; Civil Society; Politics; Espionage; Oligarchs

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