While Vladimir Lenin never actually wrote that “there are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen,” it would make for an excellent description of April 1975. Just two weeks after the Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh, Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, fell to North Vietnamese forces on April 30, 1975.
The date embodies both one of the American empire’s most devastating military defeats and one of international communism’s most spectacular revolutionary triumphs. The date is a point of national pride in Vietnam, and justifiably so.
A Century of Struggle
From one perspective, this event marked the end of the Vietnam War (more appropriately termed the Second Indochina War, ranging from 1954 to 1975), a conflict that ravaged the country for decades and left deep scars on its people and landscape. The exact number of Vietnamese deaths will never be known, but the toll may be over three million (a figure which dwarfs the 58,220 Americans lost in the war). As the conflict spilled over into Vietnam’s neighbors, it killed perhaps 60,000 and 300,000 in Laos and Cambodia, respectively.
The American use of the term “Vietnam War” fails to convey the larger historical context of what was equally a national and a Marxist revolution. As significant as the horrifically destructive American war between 1964 and 1973 was, it constituted just one phase of a longer Vietnamese struggle against foreign aggression and for a more just society.
In the longest historical focus, Vietnam had been engaged in resistance since the French first attacked the Nguyen Dynasty in 1858. Through multiple waves of imperialist expansion, the imperialist invaders seized and occupied all of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, forming the Indochinese Union in 1887. The Vietnamese opposed the French with conventional and guerrilla warfare, piracy and banditry, and countless everyday acts of resistance for over a century.
After World War I, a new generation of Vietnamese modernizers wanted to eject the French while also learning from the West. Inspired by Japan’s transformation under the Meiji Restoration and by Sun Yat-Sen’s Kuomintang in China, they called for a new Vietnamese modernity and rejected Confucian traditions. In 1927, following Sun Yat-Sen’s party strategy, the nationalist Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang (VNQDD) was founded to liberate the nation and promote a capitalist modernity. Drawn from the educated elite and wealthy families, the liberal VNQDD did not call for widespread social revolution.
The Soviet Union sponsored a more radical program. After seizing power in 1917, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party promoted Marxist world revolution. In 1919, they organized the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow to organize, educate, fund, and discipline the new revolutionaries.