ABSTRACT
The commitment to Marxism-Leninism, shaped by both Stalinism and Maoism, was great enough that it took a rude collision with reality to bump Vietnam off the rails of the command economy. Chinese merchants were hurt in the state takeover of private enterprise, but so also were Vietnamese entrepreneurs and middle peasants. But there are indications that the Soviets were pushing for greater economic efficiency and favored Vietnamese reform. The poor performance of the Vietnamese economy also created pressure for further reform. While Vietnam was earlier very much interested in the Hungarian model, which suggested the possibility of long term economic reform without much political change, the events of 1989 emphasized how very different Eastern Europe is from Vietnam. The Soviet Union can also be contrasted with China–and Vietnam–as a dominantly urban, industrial society, and one with a somewhat larger middle class, in income terms.
