Vietnam

Vietnam Communism 1890–1969 ○ Natural causes

He took on France, Japan and America in turn to win Vietnam's independence

“Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.” — wartime radio address, 1966

Vietnamese revolutionary. After three decades of exile, including helping found the French Communist Party and the Communist Party of Vietnam, he led the Viet Minh to declare Vietnam's independence in 1945. He led North Vietnam through wars against France and the United States, becoming the symbol of Vietnamese independence.

Vietnam Communism 1905–1991 → Died in exile

Pro-Chinese veteran, North Vietnam’s first ambassador to China, who defected to China after the 1979 war

After the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, he evaded surveillance at Karachi and defected to China. He denounced Vietnam’s treatment of ethnic Chinese and accused its leaders of subservience to the Soviet Union.

A revolutionary from Nghệ An, he took part in the early communist movement with Ho Chi Minh. As North Vietnam’s first ambassador to China (1950–1957) he was a crucial link between the two countries, and he sat on the Politburo from 1956 to 1976 and was vice-chairman of the National Assembly from 1958 to 1979. His influence peaked in the early 1960s when Hanoi briefly leaned towards Beijing in the Sino-Soviet dispute, and waned as relations with China soured. In July 1979, travelling to East Germany for treatment, he slipped his escorts at Karachi, took refuge at the Chinese consulate and flew to Beijing, denouncing Vietnam’s persecution of the Hoa at a press conference in August. He died in Beijing in 1991.

Vietnam Communism 1906–2000 ○ Natural causes

Ho Chi Minh's closest lieutenant and Vietnam's longest-serving prime minister, governing for 32 years

In the late 1970s, Phạm Văn Đồng told a visitor: 'Waging a war is simple, but running a country is very difficult.'

A graduate of Ho Chi Minh's revolutionary training course in Guangzhou (1926), Phạm Văn Đồng spent his life on the front line of Vietnam's independence struggle. As head of the North Vietnamese delegation at the Geneva Conference (1954), he signed the accords that ended the First Indochina War; throughout the Vietnam War he served as North Vietnam's public face, leading diplomatic and press engagement with the world. As prime minister from 1955 to 1987 (32 years, the longest tenure in Vietnamese history) he directed the war effort, reunification, and postwar socialist construction, though his adherence to wartime command economics in peacetime deepened the country's economic crisis. A revolutionary whom Ho Chi Minh called 'my other self,' he was, alongside Võ Nguyên Giáp and Lê Duẩn, one of the architects of modern Vietnam.

Vietnam Communism 1907–1986 ○ Natural causes

The longest-serving General Secretary who reunified Vietnam and invaded Cambodia in his 26-year rule

“Our party is the unique and single leader that organised… the entire struggle of the Vietnamese people from the first day of the revolution.” — reunification victory speech, 1976

A Vietnamese communist politician and theorist. A founding member of the Indochina Communist Party in 1930, he endured two French prison terms before earning Ho Chi Minh's trust and taking charge of the southern revolutionary apparatus. In 1956 he authored The Road to the South, providing the theoretical basis for the armed liberation struggle against the Saigon regime, and at the 3rd National Congress in 1960 he was elected First Secretary, becoming the party's supreme leader after Ho's death in 1969. He completed Vietnam's reunification in 1975, ordered the invasion of Cambodia to overthrow the Khmer Rouge in 1978, and held power through the Sino-Vietnamese War (1979) until his death in 1986.

Vietnam Communism 1907–1988 ○ Died

Vietnam's chief theoretician, demoted for the land reform disaster and returned to launch Đổi Mới

His revolutionary name 'Trường Chinh' — 'Long March' — was a deliberate homage to Mao Zedong's epic retreat, marking him from the start as the party's pro-Chinese theoretician.

Vietnamese communist revolutionary and chief theoretician. He joined the Revolutionary Youth League in 1928 and helped found the Indochina Communist Party, becoming its General Secretary in 1940 and leading the party through the August Revolution and the anti-French war. He was the architect of the 1953–1956 land reform campaign, whose violent excesses forced his demotion. Yet he returned to power as Chairman of the National Assembly (1960–1981) and President (1981–1987). After Lê Duẩn's death in 1986, he again became General Secretary and, in his final act, steered the party toward the Đổi Mới reforms that reshaped Vietnam.

Vietnam Communism 1911–1990 ○ Natural causes

Vietnamese Politburo member who negotiated the Paris Peace Accords with Kissinger and declined the Nobel Peace Prize

Lê Đức Thọ took effective charge of North Vietnam’s delegation in Paris in 1968 and began secret talks with Kissinger in 1970, signing the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. He declined the Nobel Peace Prize, saying peace had not yet been established in South Vietnam.

Born Phan Đình Khải in Nam Định, he helped found the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 and was held in French colonial prisons in 1930–1936 and 1939–1944. During the war against France he ran party organisation in the south alongside Lê Duẩn, and in 1955 he joined the Politburo of the Vietnam Workers’ Party. He arrived in Paris in June 1968 to take effective charge of the North Vietnamese delegation, and from February 1970 held secret talks with Kissinger that led to the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973. Named joint winner of that year’s Nobel Peace Prize with Kissinger, he declined it on the ground that peace had not yet been established in South Vietnam. He died in Hanoi in 1990.

Vietnam Communism 1911–2013 ○ Natural causes

The history teacher who defeated two empires without ever attending a military academy

As a young history teacher at a Hanoi lycée, he would sketch detailed Napoleonic campaign plans on the blackboard. His students called him 'the General.' Fifteen years later he accepted the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu.

A history teacher with no formal military training who built the Viet Minh army and defeated France at Dien Bien Phu (1954), then the United States in the war that followed. As the first commander of a colonial liberation force to break a modern imperial army in pitched battle, he spent three decades building the People's Army into a mechanised combined-arms force and perfecting a people's war aimed at breaking the enemy's political will.

Vietnam Communism 1917–2002 ○ Natural causes

Vietnamese general who led the 1975 spring offensive to Saigon and directed the 1979 invasion of Cambodia and border war with China

As commander of the April 1975 Saigon–Gia Định campaign, he directed the offensive that brought down South Vietnam's government.

Born at Từ Liêm near Hanoi, he joined the Communist Party in 1936. He fought at Điện Biên Phủ and was chief of the General Staff in 1953–1954 and 1954–1978. He commanded the 1975 spring offensive in the field that ended with the fall of Saigon, then directed the invasion of Khmer Rouge Cambodia and the 1979 border war with China. Succeeding Võ Nguyên Giáp as defence minister in 1980, he served until 1987 and sat on the Politburo from 1976 to 1986. He died in Hanoi in 2002.

Communism 1920–2002 ○ dismissed 1986 · natural death

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.

Vietnam Communism 1922–2008 ○ Died in Singapore in

Architect of Đổi Mới and prime minister of Vietnam

In a 2007 BBC Vietnamese Service interview he said "There are a hundred ways of being a patriot. The motherland of Vietnam doesn't belong to one person, one party or one group only", acknowledged the party's "serious mistakes" in the south after 1975, and urged national reconciliation.

Vietnamese politician and economic reformer. Born in 1922 to a peasant family in Vĩnh Long province in the Mekong Delta, he joined the Indochinese Communist Party in 1939 and fought in the wars against the French and then the US and South Vietnamese forces. He was party chief in Ho Chi Minh City from 1976 to 1982 and deputy prime minister from 1982 to 1991; as prime minister (1991–1997) he drove the Đổi Mới reforms and Vietnam's opening to the outside world. He died in Singapore on 11 June 2008.

Vietnam Communism 1927–

PRG foreign minister, the only woman to sign the Paris Peace Accords, and later vice president of Vietnam

At the 1969 Paris Peace Conference, she was deputy head of the National Liberation Front delegation. Later that year she became foreign minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam and headed its delegation, signing the 1973 Paris Agreement.

Born in Sa Đéc province and a granddaughter of the nationalist leader Phan Châu Trinh, she joined the Communist Party in 1948 and was held by the French in Saigon’s Chí Hòa prison in 1951–1953. During the Vietnam War she sat on the Central Committee of the National Liberation Front, and in 1969 she became foreign minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam, leading its delegation in Paris. She was the only woman to sign the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. After reunification she was minister of education, and the National Assembly twice elected her vice president of Vietnam, for 1992–2002.