Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
But DRV attention has been directed to the Moscow Declaration of 1957, embodied in the "Communique on the Conference of Representatives of Communist and Workers Parties of Socialist Countries," which took quite a different line:
"The communist and workers parties are faced with great historic tasks . . . In present day conditions in a number of capitalist countries, the working class has the possibility . . . to unite the majority of the people, when state power without civil war can ensure the transfer of basic means of production to the hands of the people . . [However] in conditions in which the exploiting classes resort to violence against the people, it is necessary to bear in mind another possibility -- nonpeaceful transition to socialism. Leninism teaches and history confirms that the ruling classes never relinguish power voluntarily. In these conditions the severity and forms of class struggle will depend not so much on the proletariat as on the resistance of the reactionary circles to the will of the overwhelming majority of the people, on the use of force by these circles at one or another stage of the struggle for socialism." 171/
The congruence of this Declaration with Ho's April, 1956, statement to the Ninth Plenum of the Lao Dong Party Central Committee (supra, 46–47) and with the rhetoric Hanoi had been using to condemn Diem, seems more than coincidental. Le Duan returned from Moscow ahead of Ho to present the results to the Lao Dong leaders, and issued on 7 December 1957 a public statement that the Declaration:
" . . . not only confirmed the line and created favorable conditions for North Vietnam to advance toward socialism, but has also shown the path of struggle for national liberation and has created favorable conditions for the revolutionary movement in South Vietnam." 172/
Some authorities have viewed the "crisis of 1957" within the Lao Dong leadership as a clash of factions over whether to align with the bellicose Mao (pro Truong Chinh, Nguyen Duy Trinh) or remain loyal to the temporizing Soviets (pro Ho and Giap). 173/ P. J. Honey, for example, found it significant that even Mao acknowledged Soviet leadership at the 1957 Moscow Conference, and notes that in February, 1948, the spokesman for the DRV National Assembly's Political Subcommittee announced that:
"Our firm international position is to stand in the socialist camp headed by the Soviet Union. . . This position proceeds from our people's fundamental interests and from
