“What can I do? The people need a god,” said the Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party Joseph Stalin as he was endeavoring to wipe out religious traditions in the Soviet Union. As occurred in many other countries where communist parties came to power, the Vietnamese communists dismissed preexisting deities when they established their rule, for these did not correspond to their ideology and policy goals.
Ho Chi Minh, the first president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam that he proclaimed in 1945, became the center of a new political religion that was essential in establishing and cementing the communist version of Vietnamese statehood and that eventually became part of the Vietnamese religious landscape.
Ho Chi Minh’s cult is the focus of my monograph project. My book will trace the origins of Ho Chi Minh’s veneration and his own role in promoting his image not only as the leader of the nation but as the Uncle, the head of the Vietnamese national family. The project contextualizes Ho Chi Minh’s cult in the Vietnamese long durée of cultural and religious history. It considers the creators and receivers of his cult among different groups in the population at different times in Vietnam and abroad and the influence that this cult exerted, thus analyzing the phenomenon of Ho Chi Minh’s cult on a global scale. It will put his cult in a comparative perspective with other communist personality cults.
The book will be based on archival resources in Vietnam, France, Russia, and other countries, as well as on publications authored by and about Ho Chi Minh, art works, and films created in Vietnam and abroad.