In the Former Soviet Union, Active Studies of Vietnam Began Compara

RESEARCH ESSAY ANATOLY SOKOLOV Vietnamese Studies in Russia and the Former Soviet Union Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jvs/article-pdf/16/1/67/454612/vs.2021.16.1.67.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 n the former Soviet Union, active studies of Vietnam began compara- Itively recently, in the early s. But in Russia, the first writings about Vietnam date back to the end of the eighteenth century. Russian and Soviet Vietnamese studies may be divided into the following (admittedly subjec- tive) periods, each of which reflects the influence of prevailing historical conditions on the field, such as the close political and socioeconomic rela- tionship between the USSR and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam during the Cold War. These periods extend () from the end of the eighteenth century until the Bolshevik Revolution in ,() from until , () from until , and () from to the present. Pre-Bolshevik Revolution (up to ) In the late eighteenth century, writings began to appear in Russian that displayed growing knowledge about certain parts of Southeast Asia, including Vietnam. The relatively limited Russian interest in this part of the world can be explained by its general insignificance to Russian economic and political interests at that time. Nevertheless, especially after the first French penetration into Vietnam in the s, passages from travel notes, naval officers’ diaries, and scientific articles about Vietnam Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. , Issue , pps. –. ISSN -X, electronic -. © by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’ Rights and Permissions website, at https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints- permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/./vs..... 67 68 SOKOLOV began to appear regularly in the Russian press at both the metropolitan and provincial levels. In , August Semen and A. Stoikovich published a book titled Mor- als, Customs and Memorials of People All over the World. The authors discuss Annam in the chapter “Zaganskv Peninsula.” In the following decade, as the French presence in Southeast Asia grew, so did the number of publications in the Russian press about Vietnam and its inhabitants. For Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jvs/article-pdf/16/1/67/454612/vs.2021.16.1.67.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 example, the first detailed factual information about Sài Gòn, notably on its harbor installations and its occupation by French troops, appeared in the article “Sài Gòn Harbor,” published in in St. Petersburg’s Family Illustrated Leaflet. At that time, events in Vietnam began to be described in journals like the European Herald, Proceedings of the Russian Geographical Society,and especially Marine Collection, which published diary notes and impressions of scientists and men of letters alongside the notes of naval officers. For example, the well-known Russian writer Konstantin Staniukovich, whose works were to a large extent about the oceans, was traveling in – on the ship Kalevala and wrote his notes called “The French in Cochin- china” at that time. In this work he described in detail the new seaport of Sài Gòn, French military expeditions and missionary activity, as well as Vietnamese resistance. Similarly, Vsevolod Krestovsky visited Sài Gòn in the early s as the secretary of the general-adjutant of the Russian squadron in the Pacific Ocean. He described his impressions of the town in his notes, which were published in Marine Collection and Government Herald. Russian diplomats, travelers, and scientists began to visit Vietnam in growing numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of their impressions were collected in the illustrated geographical collection Asia, published in . For example, the article “In Tonkin” by the famous Russian diplomat Grigory de Vollan appeared in this collection. Vietnam was also briefly discussed in the works of A. Jatsimirsky, The Chinese Southern Neighbors, The French in Tonkin and Cochinchina, and Annam, Siam and Burma (), as well as in Vera Kolokolnikova’s Indo- china: Brief Essays on Burma, Siam, Annam, Cambodia and the Malacca Peninsula (). One of the first reports on the ethnographic character of VIETNAMESE STUDIES IN RUSSIA AND THE FORMER SOVIET UNION 69 the conditions and structure of the Vietnamese peasant community was Mikhail Veniukov’s notes on the Annam community, published in the magazine Russian Thought in . The Cossak Grigori Khokhlov visited Vietnam at the end of the nineteenth century and made some interesting ethnographic observations, including those on the national clothes and customs of the Vietnamese. Russian Prince Konstantin Vyazemsky visited many countries in Asia from Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jvs/article-pdf/16/1/67/454612/vs.2021.16.1.67.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 to , traveling thousands of kilometers on horseback. During his journey he kept a diary consisting of about four dozen notebooks. In the (unpublished) diary, which he titled “Travels around Asia on Horseback,” he reflected on his visit to Tonkin and gave some sketches of Hà Nội and Huế. Professor Vladimir Tikhomirov’s journey to Sài Gòn in pro- duced the work Reminiscences of a World Tour (). Another Russian scientist, Ernest Erikson, in his travel notes “In Sài Gòn,” published in the magazine Natural Science and Geography in , describes some types of Vietnamese boat and fishing methods. A. Bolshakov was the last Russian scientist to visit Vietnam before the October Revolution of ; his notes and letters were published in St. Petersburg’s Topographical and Geodesic Magazine in . Writings about Vietnam by Russian authors published before were thus intended primarily to introduce readers to a distant country in South- east Asia. At best, it was high-quality journalism. In those years, Vietnam was not of geopolitical interest to Russia since the countries had no common border and Vietnam was still a colony of France, with which Russia was allied. Some of these writings reflected the attitudes, common among representatives of the Russian intelligentsia, of sympathy for people they perceived as weaker and oppressed. Such attitudes were aptly captured by the famous English geologist Sir Roderick Impley Murchinson in during a speech in London’s Hyde Park opposing Britain’s entry into the Crimean War: Even if Russia expands its possessions at the expense of neighboring colonies, unlike other colonial powers, it gives these new acquisitions more than it takes from them. And not because it is driven by some kind of philanthropy or something like that. The original aspirations of all empires differ little, but where a Russian person appears, everything miraculously gets a completely different 70 SOKOLOV direction. ...Those who are defeated by it or taken under its protection usually win in the end, preserving their way of life and spiritual institutions intact, despite their obvious insufficiency for progress, as you can easily see when you get acquainted with them more or less thoroughly, increasing your material wealth and significantly moving along the path of civilization. Early Soviet Union (–) Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jvs/article-pdf/16/1/67/454612/vs.2021.16.1.67.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Vietnamese studies changed dramatically in the aftermath of the Bol- shevik Revolution, when the field began to focus on the country’s position as a colonial and dependent country in the context of the world revolution. The principal problems that concerned Soviet scholars in those years were class struggle in Indochina, the rise of a national liberation movement, and the formation of communist organizations. Many of these questions were explored in the pages of journals like World Economy and World Policy, Materials on National and Colonial Problems, Communist International, and Red Trade Union International. The names of these journals evoke the themes of the works published in them, including scientific ones. The first publication in the Soviet press about Vietnam was an interview, “On a Visit to a Member of the Communist International,” in which the Moscow journalist and literary figure Osip Mandelstam interviewed a young Vietnamese patriot, NguyễnÁiQuốc. This interview, which appeared in the magazine Ogoniok in December , covers Vietnam itself, the hard life of the people in the colony, and a growing movement against French oppression. History has immortalized both participants of this interview: the first one entered the annals of the twentieth century as a famous political leader—Hồ Chí Minh—and the second did so as an outstanding poet who perished tragically in the years of Stalin’s repressions. The first Soviet scholars to meaningfully study Vietnam were Aleksander Guber, Vera Vasilieva, Boris Dantsig, and others, who regularly published their works in scientific and popular periodicals. The first full-length mono- graph about Vietnam during the Soviet period, Dantsig’s book Indo- china, touched mainly upon the economic situation in Vietnam and the problems of the national liberation movement in Vietnam in –. The political, economic, and international situation in Vietnam in the late s and early s, in the context of growing contradictions between the VIETNAMESE STUDIES IN RUSSIA AND THE FORMER SOVIET UNION 71 greatest powers of the world for supremacy in the Far East, was examined in detail in some articles and in a book Indonesia and Indochina ()bythe well-known historian Guber. Soviet studies of the Vietnamese language also first appeared in the s. The earliest significant work was the Manual of the Annamite Language, by Robert Minin. Minin was a pseudonym for Nguyễn Khánh Toàn, a Vietnamese student at the famous Communist University for the Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jvs/article-pdf/16/1/67/454612/vs.2021.16.1.67.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Toilers of the East (Stalin School), who later became a well-known social scientist and head of the Committee of Social Sciences of Vietnam.

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