ABSTRACT
Joseph Stalin did not have quite the messianic impulse of most other early Bolshevik figures, nor was he as deeply committed as was Lenin to anticolonialism as the engine of Communist revolution in Asia. Stalin seemed to regard anticolonial activity as a sometimes useful but generally undependable weapon against the capitalist world. Finally, Stalin was preoccupied, first with consolidation of internal power and social reconstruction in the USSR, then with the rise of Hitler, and finally with World War II. Such Soviet-Vietnamese party-to-party relations as did occur chiefly came about at international gatherings such as the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in April 1947, a conference called by the Indian Communist Party in 1948, and the important 1948 Calcutta Youth Conference at which the Zhadnov two-camp doctrine was delineated. In summing up the Stalin years of the Soviet-Vietnamese relationship, it would probably be a mistake to conclude that the association was merely nominal.
