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Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3 NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011 required. 85/ From 1956 through 1960 Ho, at some cost, honored the principle Mao intoned at the Communist summit meeting in Moscow in November, 1957: the Communist bloc must have a head and the Soviet Union must be that head. 86/ Soviet rebuffs of the DRV must have therefore been particularly painful for Ho. In the 9th Plenum of the lao Dong Party Central Committee (19-24 April 1956) Ho--who was in person the DRV's prime political asset, especially in view of Diem's ascendancy--dutifully recited the de-Stalinizing cant of the 20th Congress of the CPSU extrolling collective leadership, and damning the evil cult of the individual. 87/ Two weeks later, as the outcome of the meeting of Co-Chairmen of the Geneva Conference at which the Soviets tacitly accepted status quo in Vietnam, Ho received a message, dated 8 May 1956, signed by A. Gromyko, First Deputy Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, acting with the authority of his government, addressed to two sovereign states : the Governments of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Republic of Vietnam. 88/ Immediately after the deadline for elections passed, in August 195~ Ho penned a Pravda article deprecating notions that the DRV reunification "struggle" was a Vietnamese affair, denying that the DRV might develop a "national communism" of the Tito model, and rejecting ideas that the DRV might usefully pursue a course independent of the Bloc. 89/ The following January, 1957, after a stormy autumn of insurrection, the-Rectification of Errors Campaign, and "Hundred Flowers," Ho was surprised by the Soviet proposal at the United Nations to formalize Vietnamese disunity by admitting both the DRV and the GVN as member states. 90/ Nor were these the only instances of tepid support or countervailing policy from the Soviets. The DRV forwarded messages to the GVN in July 1955, May and June 1956, July 1957, March 1958, July 1959, and July 1960, urging a consultative conference on elections, offering to negotiate on the basis of "free general elections by secret ballot," and urging liberalization of North-South relations. Throughout, the Soviet Union never went beyond words and gestures of solidarity.

For Ho Chi Minh, the major international difficulties in securing foreign aid had internal ramifications as well. There is evidence of a rising tide of conviction within the Lao Dong Party that more forceful measures were necessary towards reunification, which took the form in 1957 of an attack upon Ho Chi Minh's own position, and upon the Soviet-oriented faction within the Party elite. 91/ There was also an evident realignment of the DRV hierarchy in which Le Duan, an advocate of forceful resolution of the impasse with Diem, came to prominence in mid-1957. 92/ (Le Duan who served in the South, through 1956, appears to have been de facto the Secretary General of the Party 1957-1960; there- after, he openly held the office, and is considered the second ranking member of the Politburo.) 93/

Ho Chi Minh, despite rumors that he was dead or discarded, survived the 1957 crisis seemingly intact.

By 1958 the DRV elite were apparently more disposed to seek their own solutions in Vietnam, less sensitive to the persistent coolness of Khruschev, and more responsive to Mao than theretofore. After Rh