North Viet Nam: Poor Neighbor

Communism’s busiest base in Southeast Asia these days is Hanoi, capital of North Viet Nam. Its streets swarm with Russians and Red Chinese. Laos is much on their minds. Sixty Russian pilots and flight engineers are billeted at the Union Hotel, and the persistent sound in the air is the drone of Ilyushins winging off with supplies for the pro-Communist rebels in Laos. But Hanoi’s rulers have an even more important project in mind after Laos. At party dinners, where the cutlery comes from East Germany, the glasses from Czechoslovakia and the brandy from Bulgaria, the talk invariably turns to the conquest of South Viet Nam.

the other half of the country, below the 17th parallel. Its riches are greater than Laos’, but a victory in Laos would help win South Viet Nam.

Aid Game. North Viet Nam’s sly, goat-bearded President Ho Chi Minh is getting big help from both Russia and Red China, and his favorite tactic is to play one ally against the other. For a thousand years, China dominated Viet Nam. and it was from China that Ho Chi Minh got the supplies to win at Dienbienphu. More recently, Peking sent him 8,000 technicians, is building him a steel mill and training Muong tribesmen to run it.

But last August Ho flew off to Moscow for an unpublicized talk with Khrushchev. The following month Ho sided with Moscow in its doctrinal dispute with Peking, and last December the payoff came. Russia promised to ship 43 industrial enterprises to Viet Nam by 1965, including power stations, fertilizer factories and machine-tool factories. In addition, Moscow lent Hanoi $480 million in rubles.

It was a bid that hard-pressed Red China could not match, and Russian influence now surpasses Chinese in North Viet Nam. Russian experts are found in every branch of industry. Russian professors abound in every school; the Ecole de Musique alone has 20.

Grubby & Cheerless. Ho Chi Minh is totally dependent on outside aid. Last week he announced a $2,500,000 grant from tiny Bulgaria and a Czechoslovakian offer to build him four new factories. On his own, he has not been able to lift his economy above the subsistence level.

Hanoi, long the brothel-studded “Paris of the Orient,” is now grubby and cheerless, and the once glittering Street of Silk is deserted soon after sundown, reported TIME Correspondent James Wilde, one of the few Westerners to visit Hanoi in its six years of Red rule. Crowds flock to the “people’s stores”—but only to stare enviously at shoddy goods priced way out of reach of the average worker’s 40-dong monthly salary. (A bicycle, at 400 dong, is the ultimate symbol of status.) Loudspeakers call everybody to calisthenics three times a day. Dressed Chinese-style in shapeless jackets instead of the traditional silk tunic, women are almost indistinguishable from men.

Outside Hanoi, the peasants have stub bornly resisted the Communists. After rural unrest in 1956, collective farms were all but abandoned, and the peasants were enlisted in “manpower exchange brigades,” which means only that they occasionally give one another a hand, as they always have. Since the population is booming by 3.5% a year, North Viet Nam is having difficulty just feeding its people.

About the only group that has so far benefited from the revolution is the dongchi, as the Communist cadres are called. Most are veterans of the Viet Minh fight against the French, and many are from the primitive hill tribes. Says Hanoi Newsman Thai Zuy, a Muong tribesman and a veteran of nine years with the Viet Minh: “We were savages. We had no schools, doctors—nothing. The French did nothing to help. Now my mother is eating rice for the first time in her life, and she is learning to read. A railroad has been built to our village, and my parents, to their wonder, can ride this wheeled chariot all the way to Hanoi.” From this dedicated core Ho Chi Minh draws the guerrillas to fight his blood feud against South Viet Nam.