‘Uncle Ho’ Still Revered Figure in Communist Vietnam

Lenin and Stalin have fallen. Mao Tse-tung has been blamed for “mistakes.” The radical glamour of Tito and Che Guevara has faded. But “Uncle Ho,” with his wispy beard and half-smile at the triumph of his revolution, is still securely in place.

Ho Chi Minh, the father of Communist Vietnam, has been dead for more than 20 years, but he is proving a socialist survivor as political changes shake revolutionary heroes from their pedestals around the globe.

In Vietnam’s public squares and private houses, he gazes benignly from thousands of official portraits over one of the last socialist countries in the world.

“Ho Chi Minh is in the soul of the Vietnamese people,” said one overseas Vietnamese who has returned to the country after more than a decade abroad. “It’s hard to find anybody here who doesn’t feel love for him.”

Ho’s Vietnam suffers many of the problems that brought angry crowds to the streets to rage against Communist governments from East Berlin to Ulan Bator.

Political dissent is suppressed and individual rights are subjugated to the needs of the socialist state. The economy, though benefiting greatly from reforms begun in 1987, is still saddled with a huge and inefficient state sector.

But while the Vietnamese may grouse in private about the limitations imposed on them by the Communist system, Ho himself floats above the fray.

“Ho was essentially a nationalist. People might not like communism, but they feel he is still to be revered,” said one Western diplomat in Hanoi.

“Uncle Ho only wanted life to get better for the people. We all know that,” said Ta Dac Loc, a Communist Party member who has taken advantage of economic reforms to open a toy store in the front room of his Hanoi apartment.

Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square, where Communist North Vietnam declared its independence in 1945, is the focus of a national fixation with Ho that has grown since he died in 1969 aged 79.

Here, following the lead of their Soviet mentors in Moscow, Vietnam’s leaders have built a temple-like mausoleum for the dead revolutionary, hoping his corpse will help keep his political legacy alive.

The severe Stalinist acropolis that houses Ho’s body is not what Ho wanted: He officially asked to be cremated.

But unlike Lenin, whose continued presence in Moscow’s Red Square seems more and more in doubt, Ho is unlikely to move. His tomb has become a national pilgrimage site for millions who line up for hours in the sun to pay their respects.

“We chose to preserve Uncle Ho’s body because that was the will of the people. Many people, particularly in southern Vietnam, wanted the chance to come to meet Ho Chi Minh personally,” said Nguyen Huy Hoan, deputy director of the Ho Chi Minh Museum, which lies directly behind the mausoleum.

The mammoth museum, designed by a Soviet architect to resemble a lotus and built with money from Moscow, opened in 1990. In its first year it had more than 1.2 million visitors.

“President Ho told us that after the war (against the U.S.-backed government in Saigon) we would rebuild our country 10 times bigger and 10 times better. With this museum, we are following those instructions,” Hoan said.

Nevertheless, many Vietnamese say Ho’s real appeal lies behind the tomb and imposing museum complex. There, almost hidden by trees, the small house that he built sits by a pond that flashes with golden carp.

Although offered use of the ornate palace of the former French colonial governors, Ho preferred to run his war-torn country from a simple two-room wooden cabin.

Ho’s saintly reputation--he never married--has been enhanced by the fact that, unlike China and the Soviet Union, Vietnam’s Communist revolution has avoided widespread purges and terror tactics aimed against the population at large.

“Ho didn’t have the egregious personality defects of the Stalins and the Lenins,” a senior Western diplomat in Hanoi said. “That’s why it’s easier to keep him around.”

Vietnam’s current leaders are mainly technocrats with none of Ho’s charisma. While they have enacted economic reforms to free the people from the straitjacket of central planning, they still insist on the primacy of one-party rule.

Ho, with his avuncular air, is called upon to justify that position. But most Vietnamese seem to feel that Ho’s appeal has transcended politics, keeping him safe from any future tide of political change.