Tố Hữu
Tố Hữu
Revolutionary poet laureate who, as the Party's ideology chief, policed its writers
After his failed 1985 monetary reform, people passed around the jeer: "A poet does economics, a marshal fits a birth-control ring."
A revolutionary poet who began writing in colonial prisons, he rendered the nation's struggle in lyrical verse through two wars and became the standard-bearer of Vietnam's revolutionary poetry. From 1968 he headed the Party's central propaganda and culture work, holding that literature must serve politics, and directed the harsh suppression of writers and intellectuals for which his name is now remembered in the Nhân Văn-Giai Phẩm affair. Elected an alternate Politburo member at the 1976 congress, he oversaw the merging of the south's press and cultural institutions into the unified state after reunification, then rose to deputy premier only to fall over the failed 1985 monetary reform.
Career timeline
- 1938Joined the Indochinese Communist Party
- 1945Chair of the Thừa Thiên-Huế uprising committee
- 1948Deputy general secretary, Vietnam Arts Association
- 1954Deputy minister of propaganda
- 1968–1982Head, Central Propaganda and Culture Commission
- 1976Alternate Politburo member; chair, Central Reunification Board
- 1980–1986Deputy premier (first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers)