Books in English: The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War

From Cautious Friend to Reluctant Ally: The Soviet Union and the VietnamWar

Ilya V. Gaiduk. Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954-1963. Cold War International History Project Series. Washington, D.C.: Stanford University Press, 2003. xxi + 286 pp., ISBN 978-0-8047-4712-7.
Reviewed by Tom Nichols (U.S. Naval War College)

Published on H-Diplo (November, 2004)

Cuộc Chiến Việt Nam, Liên Bang Xô Viết và chiến tranh Việt Nam bởi TG: Ilya V. Gaiduk, link to vnthuquan.net Vietnam translation: 
http://vnthuquan.net/truyen/truyentext.aspx?tid=2qtqv3m3237nmn1n3n1n31n343tq83a3q3m3237nvn)

About the Book: 

In his first book on this subject, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (1996), Ilya Gaiduk harvested a great deal of fascinating data from previously closed communist archives and produced a volume on Soviet involvement in Vietnam and communist coalitional dynamics that has few if any peers in the literature. His second book, a kind of prequel to the first (which picked up the story of Vietnam near the moment of U.S. intervention) does not disappoint, and is a worthy and fascinating companion to the first. Although Confronting Vietnam is essentially a diplomatic history, it nonetheless tells a story that carries important implications for understanding the nexus of ideology and realpolitik in war.

Readers of The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War will recognize the Soviet Union of Confronting Vietnam: an ascending superpower torn between the need to improve relations with the West in Europe and the unfortunate burdens that fall to the self-declared center of a revolutionary ideological movement. When the North Vietnamese declared themselves to be engaged in a revolutionary struggle, both the USSR and China were faced with an ideologically driven requirement to aid them.

For more, click on link below:

(http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9966)

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Foreign Authors for Vietnamese: The Lost Heart of Asia

Original Title in English
By Author: Colin Thubron
Publishers: Perennial, An Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers (1995, reprint 1995)
ISBN: 0060926562
My ref: ATA-331

About the Book: A journey into a little-know world on the brink of change, a window onto its peoples and their cultures - covered in depth by an extraordinary writer.

In this revealing work, award-winning writer Colin Thubron travels by train, bus, car and foot through Central Asia's five republics, three of which border Afghanistan: Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of these independent republics, Central Asia has been in a constant state of transition. In some countries, Muslim parties coexist uneasily with former Communist leaders who encourage capitalist investment. In others, secular Western culture is making inroads where religious tradition remains deeply rooted. 

The Lost Hear of Asia takes readers into the very heart of this region that has become the center of world attention since the events of September 11, 2001.


Authors Note: This journey was undertaken during the first spring and summer of Central Asia's independence from Moscow. A brief visit the year before yielded some valued friends.; but in the shadow of political uncertainty the identify of several people recorded here has been disguised.

Years earlier I had travelled in the nearer Moslem world, then the European Soviet Union (for which I learnt a halting Russian) and eventually China. Central Asia supplied the final, most elusive piece of this personal jigsaw.

Book Review:

West of China, south of Russia, hemmed in by mountains, steppe, and desert, lie the five Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Cut loose from Moscow in the early '90s, the five "Stans" (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan) discover that their newly found freedom plays tug-o-war with despair and a nostalgia for the certainties of the Soviet past. It's during this time that author Colin Thubron travels the width of central Asia, asking questions about the past, present, and future. Not content to simply bounce from place to place, Thubron travels from person to person, uncovering their many vibrant stories and developing a deep understanding of the area's lesser-known history. Kyrgyz and Uzbeks debate the place of Islam. Koreans and Germans, descendants from forced migrants, wonder if they know enough of their ethnic tongue to return to their homelands. Russians find themselves left behind, disbelieving, as the tide of Russian power recedes toward Moscow.

Central Asia was mostly off limits to foreigners during the Soviet years, and while officials are still uncertain about how to deal with a backpack-wearing solo traveler, the locals Thubron meets are not. Thubron finds the heart of Asia in the hearts of its people, swimming in a sea of tea, vodka, and hospitality. From the oldest-known Quran to a deserted Soviet naval base on the shores of a high mountain lake 1,500 miles from the ocean (used to test torpedoes far from spying eyes), Thubron's writing echoes the melancholy emptiness of the wide spaces he passes through. The Lost Heart of Asia is a rare meeting of a marvelous writer and a mysterious land. --Ken Peavler --

This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Contents

1. Turkmenistan
2. The Desert of Merv
3. Bukhara
4. Lost Identities
5. The Khorezmian Solitude
6. Samarkand
7. To the White Palace
8. Tashkent
9. Into the Valley
10. The High Pamirs
11. Steppelands
12. The Mountains of Heaven

Other books from same author:

• The God in the Mountain
• Emperor
• A Cruel Madness
• Falling
• Turning Back the Sun
• Mirror to Damascus
• The Hills of Adonis
• Jerusalem
• Journey into Cyprus
• Where Nights are Longest
• Behind the Wall

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Ho Chi Minh: A Life

Original Title in English by Author: William J. Duiker

Publisher: Hyperion (November 28, 2001)

Reviews:

(from Publishers Weekly)

It's difficult to think of someone more qualified to write this biography than Duiker (The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam), the retired Penn State University historian who has specialized in the Vietnam War for more than three decades. In his massive, thoroughly researched andDin the mainDquite accessible new biography, Duiker succeeds extremely well in illuminating the life and times of Ho Chi Minh, North Vietnam's leader, a man Duiker calls a "master motivator and strategist" and "one of the most influential political figures of the twentieth century." Covering both the personal and political life of the revolutionary leader, Duiker fascinatingly traces Ho's early travels to New York, Boston and Paris, as well as his many years in exile in France, China, Thailand and (during WWII and the war against the French of 1945 to 1954) in the rugged mountains of northern VietnamDeras in Ho's life for which documentation has only recently become available. Duiker's detailed recounting of the momentous and extremely complicated events that took place in 1945 following the Japanese surrender, when Ho Chi Minh's Vietminh revolutionary party seized power in northern Vietnam, is riveting. And his account of the not-always-harmonious relations between Ho and the Communist leaders of China and the Soviet Union probes a subject that has long been overlooked by Western scholars. In the end, Duiker portrays Ho Chi Minh as a fervently anticolonial nationalist who, though a committed Marxist, honestly thought he could count on the United States, which had promised to oppose French colonization after WWII. Referring to a long-raging debate about Ho, he says, "The issue is not whether he was a nationalist or a Communist in his own way he was both."

(from Library Journal)

Neither the cryptic, diabolical enemy nor the icon of the Left, "Uncle Ho" is now the subject of this objective historical study. Vietnam expert Duiker (The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam) here writes the first biography of Ho to use critical sources in Vietnamese, French, Chinese, Russian, and English. His narrative encompasses the last days of the Vietnamese monarchy, in which Ho's father was an official; the French conquest of and attempt to dominate Indochina; the anti-imperialist struggle, aided by Russian and Chinese national and Communist interests; and the career of Ho, who died in 1969, revered by some as the Father of the Revolution and reviled by others as a murderous tyrant. The author carefully sorts out the intricate, often ambiguous evidence, supplying enough background for the interested general reader and enough detail, especially in the extensive notes, for the demanding specialist. Highly recommended for larger collections.