ABSTRACT
Orthodox Marxists-Leninists are hard put to understand what is required and going on in China and Vietnam. Their difficulty is enhanced by the urge to reconcile the problems and necessary measures with MarxismLeninism and their notion that this ideology is the best guide for developing
agrarian countries. Thus, two Soviet authors, whose book mixes valuable and sometimes even critical information with staunch Marxism-Leninism, had the following to say:
The experience of Vietnam is one more confirmation of the truly international character of Lenin’s co-operative plan, which represents the scientifically founded programme for the transition of the peasant masses on their way to socialism in countries with an undeveloped economy, one of which is Vietnam, as well as in countries with one or the other level of the development of capitalism on the countryside. … Lenin’s ideas on the co-operativization of the peasantry and the rich experience of the USSR, of other socialist countries are being widely and in a creative way implemented in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. (Isaev and Pivovarov, 1987:199)
One wonders whether these authors were aware that it implied an indirect derogation of the transfer of the Soviet model, when they reported on the Sixth Congress of the Vietnamese CP of December, 1986 and its self-criticism of past mistakes-such as ‘jumping over development stages’, ‘not making agriculture the foremost front of economic development’, ‘trends of unjustified enlargement of co-operatives’— and a few pages on quoted from a Soviet brochure of 1960: ‘In the course of the agrarian transformation in the North the Vietnamese leaders widely used the Soviet experience in this question’ (Isaev and Pivovarov, 1987:72 and 77) In fact they also revealed a surprising lack of knowledge, when they wrote: ‘An essential specialty of the production co-operation was the fact that it began and developed under preservation of the peasant property of land’ (Isaev and Pivovarov, 1987:199). Not only did the Vietnamese nationalize the land in 1980, but non-nationalization would not have been a special feature there, as in the whole of Eastern Europe land formally was not, or rather late and indirectly (in Romania and Albania), nationalized.
